Having the right phone message carries the potential to make or break a caller’s impression of you and your business. Is yours a balanced blend of professional, succinct and informative?

While an effective phone message is as simple as “Hi, this is Sharon, I’m not available right now, please leave me a message after the beep and I’ll be sure to return your call…” there are a few things to consider, such as phone greeting length and what you need your callers to know.

The Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) delivery model has gained considerable traction over the last few years – and that momentum is expected to continue. According to a Transparency Market Research (TMR) report, the UC market is expected to reach $61.9 billion by 2018.

As UCaaS continues to grow, it’s important to examine the nature of this climb and evaluate its effects on business this year and onward. This includes the drivers, strategies and shortcomings of the market and how this impacts you – from a business and personal view.

Being on hold has become a run-of-the-mill occurrence – but that doesn’t mean it has to be a bad experience. In fact, according to a study by Stan Rapp and Tom Collins of Maximarketing, 88% of callers preferred on hold messages to other hold options, and 16-20% made a purchase based on an on hold offer.

Don’t miss out on an opportunity to educate and entertain your callers (bundled with the possibility of making that extra sale, which is always a plus).

The landscape for companies offering cloud communication services at a great price is extremely competitive.

Removing the need for underlying hardware, an abundance of robust feature sets and competitive price points make deciding on a cloud provider (and sticking with them) a difficult decision for consumers. 

Think about all the time, money and creativity that goes into a successful marketing campaign.

A willingness to commit precious resources to such a project are just the prerequisites. Some of today’s best marketers believe that successful marketing requires creating an understanding of the target market that a business doesn’t yet understand -- that a robust campaign goes far beyond mere packaging and telling a story.

It’s helpful to remember communication on a basic level.

One party has a message and seeks relevant listeners, or someone is seeking something and wants to know the best way to get it. Satisfying this dynamic is one of the defining characteristics separating us from the animal kingdom.

How do so many of us get this simple concept wrong?

Snap Recordings is thrilled to be an active sponsor of this year’s 14th annual BroadSoft Connections conference, Nov. 13-15 in San Antonio, Texas.

It’s pretty common for business managers to question the value of adding messages in addition to music that may be played by their business phone system’s call hold and park features. After all, callers are not going to have to wait more than a few seconds, maybe a minute max - aren’t they?

Here at Snap Recordings, we’re pretty big on using professional voice recordings for business phone systems. In fact, you could easily say that we love voice recordings!

But, why do we love professionally-recorded messages, and why should you like them as well? 

Here are a few reasons why:

Business phone systems can be confusing at times, especially since it seems that there are so many different features and every phone system provider wants to call each feature by a different name. Auto Attendants, Integrated Voice Response (IVR) and Call Center features have different functionally but share similarities. Even Auto Attendant goes by multiple aliases - Virtual Attendant, Automated Receptionist, etc. and the list of terms goes on and on.  To add more complexity - combinations of Auto Attendant, Hunt Group, and IVR feature functionality can be used simultaneously within a Call Center.