The idea that a business phone system is limited to handsets and phone lines is fast becoming obsolete as modern cloud-based phone systems go well beyond voice calls.
A modern and intelligent communication system should now include productivity features like:
- Mobile and desktop apps so your business phone number goes wherever you go (even when mobile)
- Call analytics and insights that understand why callers are reaching your business (plus what was said)
- Automated call recordings that are available for reviewing staff calls or managing business risk
- Seamless integration with Email and Calendar so you're in sync with your address book and schedule
Watch the video below as we present our pick for the best cloud-based phone system:
Are you still using the traditional PBX system for your business? What if you or anyone from your team is not in the office, how will your customers reach you?
Dialpad is the only phone system that you'll ever need for your business. It gives you the ability to take your business calls anywhere and anytime.
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If you need any tech help or in setting up Dialpad, connect with our team or join Concierge today.
Transcription:
Now, I'm going to be taking you guys through getting your phone system right now. We've been working with an amazing company called Dialpad for a number of years now. This is an application which came to the Australian market with our help. They were primarily in the US, hadn't expanded to Australia, and we pleaded, and pleaded, and pleaded for the founders to bring this amazing piece of software to Australia.
Now, if you haven't heard of Dialpad, it's a cloud-based phone system. That means that everything runs online. I'm going to give you a bit of an overview of it and really share why this is a very special piece of technology. It's not just for tech sake, this is something that really helps you solve business problems. I really love it, because for me, it creates more freedom in my life, especially as I do a lot of travel and I want to be able to work from my phone, want to be able to be mobile, but I also want to be able to be accessible and contactable to customers as well. Absolutely love Dialpad and it's been a very important part of our business journey.
Who might this be interesting for? Why would this be useful for you? If you're a business owner and you're using a traditional phone system, so like a system that sits in an office with a box and a bunch of wires and stuff plugged into it to enhance it sitting on desks, then this is going to be useful. It is also going to be useful if you are someone who runs around, running everything off your mobile. It's also going to be useful for you as well because Dialpad solves a lot of problems for different phone systems.
If you've dabbled in online VoIP-based systems like maybe Skype or maybe something else online, then you will be impressed, I think, with some of the features of Dialpad.
Dialpad is a cloud-based phone system. As I said, everything effectively runs online. What that means is, there's no server software to install locally. It means that you don't have to have a central server running, and everything runs in the cloud. One of the great things about that is, from time to time, we have internet connection issues at maybe the office, or at home, or wherever we are. If our phone system is dependent on a single internet connection, for example, if you have a VoIP system that is primarily based in an office, and if the office internet connection goes down, then you're basically out of luck. You run into a lot of trouble.
That's why a cloud-based system works great, because no matter where I am, as long as I have a 4G or a wifi signal on my phone here, I can actually access the Dialpad system and I can work on easily. Now, of course, it runs on the mobile, it also runs on the desktop, runs in the browser as well, and it runs excellent on Chromebooks, so it's a great solution if you're looking for a phone system that doesn't have to use desk phones, but you can still use desk phones with it as well. If you're interested in that, you can certainly still use it for a desk phone as well. You just buy those third party, and we help you plug them in and hook it up to the system.
The great thing about Dialpad, because it's online, it's like all other pieces of software, it's able to be rapidly improved, and Dialpad are rapidly improving the product. They've invested in AI, they have invested in Google Cloud technology and really built some really awesome features into it, of which I'm going to be taking you through some of those. If that sounds interesting to you, then I think you're really going to enjoy this.
Let's talk about the differences between Dialpad and using a traditional phone system. We've talked about the internet and the downtime kind of thing. The other thing is, when a phone system is based in your office and it has a box that it's running out of, it typically requires an IT person to help manage that box. What that means is that you have to call and have someone fiddle around with things anytime you want to onboard a new staff member, or maybe you want to change an extension number, or maybe you want to update a call flow. It's always a call to a tech support person, and that may be $100 or $200 per hour, or they may be slow to respond to business changes that you need done. Or, in some cases, we've heard business consultants and phone system people are just completely nonexistent, some of them disappear, and you get stuck with outdated hardware that doesn't get updated, and so every three to five years, you end up replacing it and buying a whole new system.
This is the cycle of the CapEx of traditional phone systems, and it's not great. Not only that, but when you have handsets in the mix, as you grow and build the business, you have to then have to source old versions of handsets, or maybe you try and overbuy so you know that you have enough for everyone, and you start to run into troubles there as well. It really does become a burden just managing all of that technology.
Now, many businesses have just switched and they've completely gone to mobile. They're either using mobiles for all of their business, or at least the business owner is using the mobile for all of their calls, but that also introduces a number of problems as well. That is that, if you're giving out your mobile number, then everyone kind of feels like you're contactable all the time, and that is pretty darn dangerous.
As a business owner, if you are the person that everyone is calling, then not only are you not able to provide great support and great service to your customers, but you're never going to get a break. It's just absolutely impossible. You can't ever build a business if you're completely chained to a device, and at the behest of anyone who wants to call it.
I'm strongly, strongly recommending that you look at and reevaluate your relationship with your mobile phone in order to give better service to your customers and actually help your customers out.
Now, how can we do that? Well, using a system like Dialpad, we can actually remove ourself from being the primary contact of our business from our customers. By that, I mean, take your mobile off your business cards, take it off your email signature, and stop using your mobile phone, stop advertising that your mobile phone is available. If you wish to still be contactable via a direct line, then you would use one of your virtual phone numbers. In this case, we'll use one from Dialpad.
Now, what happens there is, it means that if your customers need to get in touch with you, if it's 7 o'clock on a Friday night, you know whether it's a business call or a personal call coming through. If we've given out our mobile number to everyone, then anyone can call that number, and we're probably going to answer, but it's maybe not going to be great for your boundaries around when it's work time and when it's personal time.
That also means that you have the problem, if someone calls you and leaves a message on your mobile, it's not really a great way for you to route that customer request to your team, because that's stuck in the voicemail on your mobile phone. And so, when you switch to moving away from mobiles and you switch to using a business phone system and a business phone line, and you train your customers to use that as well, what that means is that you are no longer the central point of contact for everyone trying to get in touch with you. That means that you're able to deliver much better support to your customers. How do we do this using Dialpad? Let me show you and talk through some of the different features.
First of all, first great thing about Dialpad is, it's fixed fee. So you get unlimited calling, or you can add calling and you just pay per user. That makes it really easy because you have one fee per month, or you can add calls the mobiles, or you can add calls to your landlines as well. Premium numbers, I think, are also included in as well, but effectively, that means that all of your calls are taken care of for one fee, and that removes the cost of bill shock. It removes accidentally having a busy month and then getting a massive spike in your bills from Telstra. Because it's online, it also removes your landline costs. Everything runs on the internet, and so you no longer need physical copper wires being pulled into your office.
Now, the NBN is going across Australia, and bit by bit, everyone's having their fixed line internet connections removed and upgraded to either a coaxial or a fiber connection under the NBN. That doesn't mean that people aren't still hanging on to line rental costs with providers like Telstra. You can completely eliminate those by switching to a cloud-based business system, and you can keep your phone numbers as well. So you can actually port in and retain your existing business landline numbers, if you have them, and actually bring them into Dialpad. That makes things really, really easy, and it means that you don't have the problem of things going up and down.
Now, remember that I mentioned that one of the pitfalls of a old school phone system is the CapEx of refreshing it every three years. Well, you don't have that either. You may choose to buy a couple of handsets to put on your desk with Dialpad, but honestly, most of our customers will only buy one, and the rest of their staff will actually use a USB headset plugged into their machine, or maybe a pair of EarPods or something like that. So you have all of your stuff happening on the computer and you don't really need to worry too much about how things work on an office desk phone type setup. We can just completely eliminate that.
We've gone through those basics and what are some of the key differences. I want to get into like some of the advanced stuff, some of the cool things that you can do with a cloud-based system. Now, number one, because it works across all your devices, you can be signed in on all your devices. What that means is that, let's say you've got a call coming in, and I'm going to go ahead and open up my Dialpad pad here. You should be able to see my screen. Just let me know if you cannot see my screen. Okay, I'm going to check. This is all good.
I've got my Dialpad that's sitting here. Inside my Dialpad, when a call comes in, it's obviously going to come in on my computer. If I am on an active call with my mobile phone, I can actually switch it to my computer, or switch it from my computer to my mobile phone. What that means is, as I am working, I'm able to actually switch between different devices. Maybe I'm in the office and I need to like run out the door, I'm on a long call, I can just put my headset on, open up the Dialpad app on my phone, and boom, I'm into the call and I'm out the door. It's going to connect up from the app on my phone, into my car, on Bluetooth, so I can get access to that as well. It basically means that, wherever I am, I can access my Dialpad.
Now, of course, one of the great things about Dialpad is, because it's installed on multiple devices, every device rings when I get a call. That means whether I'm by my computer or by my phone, anywhere I answer, it's just going to take the call there and the rest stop ringing. Another great little feature. Wherever I am, like in the office or at home, I'm able to grab those calls.
Now, I mentioned earlier that some of our customers will pick up a desk phone. The reason that they'll get a desk phone is because if you've got Dialpad sitting on the computer in your office, and maybe, I don't know, everyone is away from their desks having a chit-chat in a breakout room, or you're doing your daily huddles, stand-ups, something like that, well, if someone's computer rings, then you've got to like run to the computer and unlock it and put on your headset and answer the call. That's a bit of a pain in the butt.
So having one desk phone in your office, it's probably a good idea so you can at least run to it, and grab it, and pick up the phone. Or, if you're at home and you want to put your mobile phone in a drawer and leave your computer locked when you're having some non-work time… Everyone's working at home right now, and so we've got to have a good separation between what is work time and what is home time. Well, that might be another reason why you would put a desk phone sitting down there in your actual office or workspace so that if you're not near the computer and you're not near your mobile phone, you can run and grab the phone. Personally, I usually don't bother. I just use my computer or my mobile phone for it.
There are some of the key things that are useful in the basics. I want to get into the actual app and show you guys how that works, because Dialpad is a phenomenal phone system. It does a bunch of stuff that you just wouldn't expect any other phone system to do, like transcribing, like automatic recording, like even listening into your calls, and doing intent, and so we're going to do some experiments there.
Cool. I am going to go ahead and open up my Dialpad here. Let me show you guys my screen. This is the Dialpad app. This is the actual interface of Dialpad, This is what it looks like. You can see, I've got my inbox here which kind of shows any calls that I've missed recently, or any voicemails that I've received. I've got access to all of those. If I go into my calls menu, that's going to show me a summary of all of my calls; all of the calls that I've received, all of the calls that I've missed, all of the calls that I've made. I've got things like the duration, whether they were inbound and outbound. All that kind of stuff is pretty rudimentary. You would expect to get that from a cloud-based phone system. Pretty straightforward.
I have all of my voicemails here, and Dialpad will actually transcribe my voicemails. It uses voice-to-text and it automatically transcribes my voicemails, and they all sit here. The other cool thing that Dialpad does is it will actually put my voicemails into my Google Drive, and it will put my call recordings into my Google Drive as well. All of those sit in my Google Drive if I ever need to open them, or maybe I had a decent call with a customer and I want to keep that recorded for training for my team, then I can actually just drag and drop that in Google Drive right into the recordings folder. Super, super simple, and very, very useful. I've got all my recordings there as well. So any calls that I've recorded will automatically sit there in recordings, and of course, they'll be sitting in my Google Drive as well.
Now, they're my calls, and that's what I see in my calls, but what about the team? What do my team actually see? My team are going to have calls to the company line as well as calls to their direct lines. Let me say that again. We have calls to the company line, and then we have calls to direct lines. Now, calls to the company line are actually the calls that come into the business. With each Dialpad account, you get one company line, and then each person has an individual direct line.
Now, you don't have to use those direct lines for individuals. If you want your staff to just all be kind of like sharing the one main line, that's fine. Most businesses when they dial-up, they just want everyone basically dialing up from the same number. So you just use the one main company line, but if you want to use direct lines, you can as well. I will use my direct line because when I call someone, I want them to call me back directly. For any other one of our customers, we've got 1,500 odd customers, each one of those, I want to be calling the main line and not trying to call individually to our individual team members, because we've just got too many people for people to remember the right number for someone to call. So we're going to use the company line as the main line, and you could forward a 1300 number to that company line if you want to, and then the individual lines are what each person has.
Let's have a look at what they look like. Let's jump into my Dialpad account here. You can see here, I've got my Dialpad numbers. My Dialpad number, at the top here, that's my direct line. If you call that from any phone, it's going to come through straight to me. I've also got a US number added there as well, so I also have a US direct line. That's an option too. You can have multiple lines in multiple different localities. And then you can see here, we also have the main number, and the main number is the one for the company. This is the one that anyone can call and it's going to go through to our different team members. The main company line is the one that's available there for anyone who calls the main line, and anyone on our team who is designated to answer will have their phones ring when that main company line rings.
I'm going to show you through the setup panel and show you how you can manage it and set it up yourself, but I just want you to get that concept, that you have the main line, and then you have the individual lines as well, because that's how we kind of route and set up calls.
When we want to set up our team and we want to have them access these different ring groups, you might call them, or line hunts you might call it. If you've had a old school phone system and you had like four copper wires coming into your office, you might have had a line hunt set up, which means if someone was busy on one of the lines, you could call the same number from the first line and it would like overflow onto the second line. I hope that makes sense. Dialpad does that all digitally and virtually. So as many people as you like can call your main line and the calls will still come through to your team. Pretty groovy, right?
Let's see how we set up our main line. I'm going to go into my options here, and we're going to set up our users. It's pretty straightforward to add users. I just click on Add Users, and then I can add them by email from my own Dialpad account, and they're all going to show up here. And then, on the main line is where I'm going to actually set up who I want to be an operator. Remember that I said that, operators are those who are going to have their phones ring when the calls actually come through. Each one of these people is an operator on the main line. When the main line rings, it's going to go to all of these operators and then people are able to pick it up.
If I want to do something like have a call menu, like a Telstra type of business, press one for sales, press two for support, blah, blah, blah, I can set up all of those things here. If I go to my normal business hours, let me go and set that one up. I'm going to share my screen here. You can see here, these business hours, I can choose what happens. You'll see here, we've got two simple options and that's, “Are you a new customer, or are you an existing customer?” Only thing that we need there, and then customers can press a number there and it's going to automatically go through to the right people.
Inside the Dialpad app, I can actually see all of the calls coming in and out of the main line. If I switched to my main line here, I'm going to go to all calls, I can see every call inside and outside the business for the whole company. You can see, we get quite a few calls on a daily basis, so all of my calls are coming through. I can see who made them, if they were outbound calls and if they are inbound calls. I can also see who answered them, how long they lasted for based on my team. One of the things that I really love about this is, inside these calls here, you can see who abandoned a call. If a customer called and then actually dropped off, then automatically, I can give them a call back from there. I can actually see anyone who's had trouble reaching our team. If someone's had trouble reaching our team, our team can actually decide to give them a call back.
Imagine if you had called a large call center, like a Telstra or someone else like that, a large conglomerate, and you were not able to get through, so you hung up because you were sick of waiting, and that company actually called you back and said, “Hey, I saw you had trouble getting in touch with us. Can we we help out with something?” Really, really great way to be able to deliver amazing customer service.
Let's talk a little bit more about the actual setup, the bits and pieces. So we've set up some call groups, we've got the people who are able to access the calls, let's jump on an actual test call and have a go at that. I'm going to call my colleague Angel, and hopefully she's ready for this. I think she's listening in to the stream. I'm going to go ahead and call her, and we're going to open up a call inside of Dialpad.
Now, making a call inside Dialpad is really simple because all you have to do is search for someone by name, and it's actually going to pick up all of your contacts from inside your Google address book. Everything is going to be synced to your Google account. It does also work with Office 365 as well, which is pretty damn cool. It's going to bring in all of that information inside your Dialpad. Now, not only will I be able to access all of my contacts from inside my Google account, you can see here, all of my calendar events will show up, emails and documents with the person that I'm calling.
Think about Dialpad as nearly a little bit of a CRM system, it's kind of verging on that. What Dialpad does is it effectively connects to these productivity apps, talks to your contact list, and from that contact list, it's going to bring up the last emails, or calendar events, or anything else that you have with that person. Super groovy.
Now, I've just connected to the call with Angel. You can see that it's automatically transcribing. I'm going to come back to that in a second, but I've got my call open. I've got all the basic call controls. I can record the call here, that's going to record it to the cloud and automatically drop it into my Google Drive if I like. I can mute myself, pause, hold, that kind of stuff. Pretty straightforward.
One of my favorite features is the transfer. What the transfer allows me to do is to actually switch over to someone else inside the company just by name. If I wanted to transfer this call to Reid, I can just actually type in that person's name. I don't have to dig around with anything like extension numbers or remembering what someone's number is. I can just go ahead and press one button, and it's going to allow me to transfer. I can ask first, or transfer now.
These are features that are usually only available in call centers or in enterprise level phone systems, but this is a small business product with small business pricing as well, which is just absolutely phenomenal. Outside of the transfer menu, I can do call conferencing. I can add a third person into the call, that kind of thing. Unfortunately, you're not able to add more than three parties in total on a call, but it will, at a minimum, allow you to add one extra person to the call so you can have three in there, which is pretty cool. That's the basics of the call. That's all pretty straightforward. Let's get into some of the sexy stuff.
Now, you can see if you had keen eyes, as I opened the call, Dialpad actually began transcribing my calls. Here, I have a real time transcription of the call. It even says, “I'm talking too fast. I need to slow down for it to transcribe,” but you can say there, it's actually transcribing everything that I say while I'm on the call. What Dialpad does, this is still a beta feature, but what Dialpad does is it saves that transcription of every one of your calls inside Dialpad, and so you can always download them, you can always go back to them later, and all of those transcripts will be attached to that contact.
Now, unfortunately, it doesn't push them over to your CRM system. It may do that for Salesforce. There is the integration with Salesforce, but most small business owners are not using Salesforce, it's quite expensive, but being able to have that transcription there. It also gives you action items. Super-duper cool stuff. Now, that one is still in beta, hasn't yet been fully released to Australian customers, but that one is there, which is pretty cool.
One of the things that this does, is it actually filters all of those conversations up into your reports. So you have an analytics page inside of Dialpad, and that analytics page shows you everything that's going on inside your Dialpad system. You can see all of the call records, who are your top callers, what kind of volumes you're getting from customers coming through, but most importantly, you can see like how many different calls are missed, who's spending the most time on phones. If you've got a sales team and you need to monitor and measure their activity, you can use this to take care of the management of the activity of employees who are in sales or a customer-facing role where you know how much time roughly they should be spending on the phone each day.
It's absolutely awesome to be able to see who your top performers are right from within Dialpad. Not only does it kind of track all of the records, we have positive sentiment and negative sentiment. What those are is a special piece of AI technology which listens to your calls. It uses a piece of AI technology to listen to the word said, listen to the tonality of what was said, and actually predict if someone is having a positive or a negative experience. And then you can use this menu as a roll-up of what your customers are experiencing when they're having conversations with your team members. This is an absolutely amazing, amazing, amazing feature. I've never seen anything like that in any kind of phone system. What it allows you to do is use that for coaching for your team.
Imagine you have a team member and you're getting consistently poor scores on the results from customers, or they're not doing great in their sales results, then you can actually use this for absolutely amazing, amazing feedback tool.
That's a little bit of a wrap on Dialpad. If this is something that you're interested in, we have a test-drive available. I would recommend that you don't go to the Dialpad website and actually set this up yourself. If you set up a trial, then we're not able to set up the licenses for you. We sell the licenses at the same price that Dialpad do because we're a reseller. It's best to get it through us because we have local support and we know our way through the local porting process to help do things like port your numbers in.
If you're at all interested, then do a test-drive with our team. A test-drive actually includes our team setting up and configuring Dialpad for you, professional setup. You get four training sessions with our team, configuring all the call records, setting it up, so it's actually forwarded into your team as well. You can get your existing calls and basically forward them into Dialpad so you can fully test the system, make sure you're happy with all of it, and then from there, you can choose whether or not you want to proceed with licenses. You get to play with it as much as you like for 14 days.
Now, if you're interested in that, please go and head along to it.genius.com, head along to the Dialpad page, and then you can organize a test-drive there.
We've got more deep dive videos on our YouTube channel. Thank you so much for joining. I'm going to sign off for now. Until next time guys, take care. If you haven't already joined our free group for G Suite members, then go ahead and join that below. It's for businesses who are utilizing Google Cloud or are interested in Google cloud, and we have heaps of free resources in there.
If you haven't already checked that out, there's a link in the description. Head along to our G Suite community group, and I will see you guys in there. Take care.
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