Business VoIP in Lansing, MI

Calls that arrive on somebody else's calendar

Most businesses experience demand as weather: it comes, you cope, you cannot predict it. A capital with a large public sector and a large university alongside it is different, because a great deal of the activity runs on published dates.

Sessions sit, budgets close, terms start and end, procurement deadlines land, and an enormous student population arrives and leaves within a fortnight twice a year. If your customers are any of those, your phone has a pattern, and that pattern is printed somewhere you can read.

That is a genuine advantage and most businesses waste it. The two failure modes are building for the peak and paying for it in the quiet months, or building for the quiet months and being unreachable in the weeks that actually matter. Both are avoidable when the dates are public.

The useful response is not more lines, which is where most businesses go first. A capital's busy weeks are not mainly higher volume, they are higher stakes: the callers are counterparts working to a date that is not moveable, and what they need is the right person rather than any person. So the thing to get right before a known peak is routing and cover. Who is named as the fallback for each person. What happens to a call when that fallback is also in a meeting. And whether anybody is watching messages during the week when a day's delay is the whole problem.

That is a rota and a set of rules rather than a purchase, which is why it tends not to get decided until the week it matters. Write it down once, before the season, and it holds for every subsequent year because the dates do not move.

Who gains here

Three quite different economies overlap in this area: state administration and the professional services around it, automotive manufacturing and its supplier network, and the accommodation, retail and trades that serve a large transient population.

The first two want the same unglamorous things. A direct number per person, because the caller is usually a known counterpart who wants one individual and is working from a list. A greeting short enough not to punish them for calling. And something better than voicemail when that person is unavailable, because somebody working a list moves to the next item rather than waiting. Virtual phone system and auto attendant and extensions cover both.

The third wants capacity on the weeks that matter and not much the rest of the year, which is the seasonal question above rather than a feature question.

Who should not bother: one person, one phone, customers who already reach you. That is a monthly cost against a problem you do not have. And if the connection into your building is unreliable, deal with that first, because voice is less forgiving than anything else you run over a line. VoIP vs landline is the honest case for keeping copper.