It was interesting to read a report from the BBC explaining that stress was one of the main causes of sick leave in 2013, with an average of 5.3 sick days taken by employees at an approximate cost of £14bn to the UK economy. Your business’ phone system may seem to be an unlikely cause of stress, but it may surprise you to find that having a phone system with the latest features can enable your staff to work far more efficiently and therefore lower their stress levels. Here are a few examples of how we encourage our staff to use our phones:
Call Divert
Meetings are a natural part of the business world, but returning from a meeting (possibly with a lot to do) to find you’ve missed calls you from people you needed to speak to and have numerous answerphone messages can leave people feeling stressed. We encourage staff to use the call divert feature, forwarding calls to their mobiles so that they can stay on top of certain projects if they need to.
Availability Checker
Using our Computer Telephony Integration we’re able to check to see if somebody is available to take a call or not without calling them. We’ve found that this saves staff great amounts of time in both forwarding on calls and talking to colleagues about joint projects.
Customer Information Display
Sales and customer service can be a particularly stressful environment, so giving staff in these areas tools to help them can lower stress. The same Computer Telephony Integration mentioned above will allow the employee to see important information about the caller as soon as their phone rings. See what the customer ordered, their outstanding tickets and enquiries, all of which serves to improve customer performance and lower your employees’ stress levels.
We’re not saying a good business phone system will rid your company of stress, but improving the way your employees work can help to keep stress levels down and improve your company’s productivity.
