What Is Announcements?

Most businesses rely on the ability to deliver many kinds of announcements, both to customers and their workforce. Your business communications can be enhanced significantly by two VoIP announcement features in particular: automatic phone greetings for inbound calls, and internal VoIP paging. While these announcement features differ in their intended audience and function, they deliver the same kinds of benefits: improved productivity, clearer messaging, and a resource-efficient way to bring enhanced professionalism to how your company gets its messages across.

How Do Announcements Work?

One way announcements can play an important role in your company is through automatic phone announcements delivered by an auto-attendant. In this context, announcements work similarly to a menu system on a website — albeit via a voice interface. A customer contacting your company by phone will hear a pre-recorded greeting, followed by a range of menu options they can choose from, either by voice command or by using the number keys on their phone. You may be less familiar with an internal VoIP paging service. Using technology as a platform, announcements can be used to message a sender within your company, typically via a voice message that can reach any VoIP communication device within the company’s communication infrastructure. It’s similar to how an older paging system might work, with the added versatility of reaching your team (or a defined group within your organization) on any communication device.

When Should I Use Announcements?

Your company might opt to use announcements in conjunction with an auto-attendant if you regularly receive calls from customers with specific and predictable inquiries — an obvious example would be a customer seeking information about a particular product. The larger and more segmented your company workforce, the more productivity gains you stand to realize through this kind of auto-attendant service. Using announcements through VoIP paging is a powerful information sharing option if your company regularly needs to share crucial data in real-time. Emails and company-wide memos tend to get lost. A VoIP paging announcement, by contrast, commands instant attention.

Benefits of Announcements

Here are some of the main benefits you’ll likely experience from building announcements into your arsenal of company-wide communication methods:

• Saved money: Announcements minimize repetition, saving you considerable time, and delivering an improved bottom line.
• More professional messaging: Unscripted communications produce inconsistent results. By preparing your company messaging in advance, you gain the luxury of being able to ensure that the information you impart is cogent, crisp, and consistent.
• Responsiveness: A VoIP announcement service is highly configurable. As circumstances change, you can easily customize your messaging accordingly. VoIP announcement services make your company agile in responding to change.