Stellar customer service is a vital part of a business. Satisfied customers are often repeat customers – who also refer friends and family to you to use your services or purchase your products.

Many companies put in a lot of work to ensure their employees are providing top-notch customer service. But, there are many aspects that come to contributeing to the experience customers have when interacting with your company – and one of them is how convenient it is to communicate with you via your telephone service.

Your telephone service and communication is likely a critical part of your business. Let’s take a look at 4 ways your telephone service could have either an impact on the customer service experience being provided by your company:

When a customer calls your business line and no one answers – what happens? Does voicemail pick up or does the call forward to another phone? How long does it ring before a call is answered?

Like it or not, not every phone call will get answered and that’s not a bad thing! Many callers would just as soon leave you a message with the details of what they need and get on with their day leaving it up to you to respond. When your phone is not answered, there are two must-have features:

- A professionally recorded greeting. You can do this yourself with a good quality mic and a quiet place. Or you can have one made for you by professional talent.

- The greeting or IVR menu must give the callers the most common options and direct them quickly and clearly. No more than 3 or 4 options in a menu.

Don’t let your voicemail greeting be generic! Nothing makes a positive impression like a personal greeting. Whether a call reaches an individual employee’s line or the front desk, each voicemail should be personal and genuine.

It should also not be too specific unless you have a dedicated system for updating the voicemail message. It's ok to change your greeting to indicate when the office is closed for a holiday, but you should have a system in place to update the greeting immediately when you return so you do not have an out-of-date greeting.

Or you can use the schedule feature of Diamond Voice to do it for you automatically.

Ah yes, the dreaded “This mailbox is full and can’t take another message”! Nothing frustrates a caller and says that you don’t follow up with your callers more than a full mailbox!

But there are simple solutions. Maybe you don’t actually like listening to messages, or maybe by the time you get around to it, the moment has passed. Here are two things you can do:

- First, make sure that your voice mailbox sends you an email or text message when a new message is left. That puts the message in the palm of your hand instantly, right there on your cell phone.

- Second, check that your mailbox doesn’t have any capacity limitations. In the early days of voicemail when storage was expensive, voice mailboxes had limits. That is no longer necessary. Your box should be unlimited.

Finally, if you just don’t want people leaving you messages, tell them! Change your greeting to tell them a better way to get in touch: text, email, cell number, smoke signals, whatever… Just don’t make them expect to be able to leave a message and then have to deal with a full mailbox message! Then, turn off messaging taking ability on your voice mailbox.

Static or low volume or drop out or delay will frustrate you and your callers and is no way to run a business! But how do you locate the problem? It could be anything from the cables on your phone to your internal network switch, your ISP’s router, internet connection, the upstream data connections or your phone service provider.

- If it is only happening on one phone, try reconnecting the cables, checking for loose connections.

- If it happens on all your phones, restart your ISP router and network switch.

- If that doesn’t clear it up, contact your telephone service provider. They can determine if the problem is in your internet or with them or someplace else.