Voicemail-to-Email is standard on Hosted PBX Business Phone Systems. Although the feature is not particularly new, it adds an extra layer of convenience and efficiency but it’s not always used to full advantage. Here are a few practical benefits as well as a few less obvious uses Voicemail to Email may have for your business.

Clients can judge a business on the speed and clarity of customer service. We can’t always answer our phone, so having an extra feature that makes returning missed calls easier increases customer satisfaction. The benefit of having voicemail going directly to your email inbox is that you can see and access it from anywhere and respond as if you were in the office. This gives customers a sense of 24/7 access, without requiring employees to actually live at their desk.

Listening to voicemails on your phone is convenient, but it can get disorganized. Having to search and scroll through a cluster of voicemails, or wait to listen to them in the order they arrived - that can annul some of the benefits of mobility. Voicemail-to-Email makes managing out-of-office communications far more efficient.

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With Voicemail-to-Email a caller's voice message is transferred as an email attachment. That email is stamped with date, time, duration of call, name and number of caller, and - if you have an auto attendant on your business phone system - which pathway/extension brought the caller to your number. For example - if a prospect called the main line and opted to connect to sales - that pathway will be identified. All these Voicemail-to-Emails are located in one location on your screen which makes them easy to organize. You can click to prioritize which clients need a quick response; forward on to colleagues; file away with a reminder to respond later; or simply delete. The audio message attachments themselves have a ‘control playback’ format, making it easy to play, pause, and skip to the parts you need to hear again.

Voicemail-to-Email provides levels of ‘backup’ that make it nearly impossible to lose a record of the call or the audio message itself. Since we have email on several devices, deleting a Voicemail-to-Email from one doesn’t always remove it from another. Essentially, it’s almost impossible to ‘lose’ an actual recorded voicemail or accidentally delete one since it also transfers to your ‘deleted’ folder in several places.

A less well known feature of Voicemail-to-Email has brought value for Managers and Supervisors seeking to monitor employees. A setting on the console allows a manager/owner/supervisor to directly access ‘voicemail-to-emails’ to other numbers. Furthermore, that management interaction can occur invisibly without the primary recipient’s knowledge. Whether a manager is just looking to check in periodically on a junior employee or trainee’s progress, or to monitor their interaction with clients for regulatory, security or even Human Resources oversight - the option exists via a simple on/off setting. At console admin level, Voicemail-to-Email for any number can be set to automatically cc to a specific Manager, or allow direct access with all the same abilities to forward, respond, prioritize - with or without leaving a record.

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