As your company expands its reach to international countries and different time zones it may become harder to keep your company operating as one. Many companies expand to different countries around the globe, and even smaller companies will expand their reach to other countries because of the profitability and ease thanks to the developing technology. To keep your company growing, here are a few tools that can help companies in their international expansion efforts, or to maintain greater control with employees across the world.
Virtual Phone Systems
Virtual telephone systems are the best way to stay in contact with your sister businesses overseas, as well as your consumers overseas. The virtual phone system makes it possible for international employees to work together and more efficiently. It’s also a great tool to use for customer service. Virtual telephone providers often provide a variety of features that allow employees to manage their relationships with customers with greater ease.
These features can also help with better training. At Global Call Forwarding, one feature that can be very useful is Call Recording. This feature can be used to inspect each call and analyze whether each sales team is following the same protocol. It can also be used to evaluate the effectiveness of each call for future reference. After successful use of this tool, it will be easier for your international teams to remain consistent. Whether they are in America, England, or India. To follow up on other details, simply look to the Account Management feature that is also featured at Global Call Forwarding.
Virtual Phone Numbers for Your International Team
Using virtual phone numbers will reduce challenges and allow your international teams to create relationships with their local customers. This should be the #1 goal of each of your international teams. Finding new customers and keeping them is the reason you expanded your business in the first place. If your customer service call center operates in India, you can still use local area codes from places all over the world using a virtual phone system. For example, your Indian customer service reps can place a call using a local area code to San Francisco in America. And that’s yet another important tip: you should always be using local area codes for your customer service calls. A customer in San Francisco is unlikely to answer a call from India, but much more likely to answer one with an area code from the San Francisco area. Not only because an India number might be foreign to them, they will probably also associate the number with extra fees.
Advanced IVR and PBX
When you have remote workers all over the world, an advanced IVR / PBX allows each worker to work from different parts of the world without being left out of important updates or team calls.
The IVR can be programmed to connect your teams by creating a welcome message followed by important announcements. This can all be done with your company phone system and does not require any extra hardware. Each phone system carries necessary information, such as accounts and contacts, that each international team needs to know. They can access this important information at any time, which is essential since they will all be working in different time zones.
The IVR system can be used to create a private telephone network that only you and your employees can use. They will each have their own extension that can be accessed by other employees. Using your own private system within the virtual phone system you already have will lower your operating costs, as well.
If you allow your employees to work remotely in different countries, it is likely they will be more productive than if they were to have to report to an office. Keeping your team together through a virtual phone system will create a great working experience throughout the globe. It might seem like the teams would feel disconnected, but having the ability to contact your international team’s number through an easy-to-use virtual phone system will actually help each team work together more effectively.
For your company, expanding should be a goal. However, expansion can become quite tricky if it is not handled well. Communication becomes key to the expansion of international territories.
Using a virtual call system to keep your various teams connected will allow each team to work more efficiently separately and remotely while maintaining an overall synergy for your overarching business.
