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We live in a highly-connected and online-obsessed economy, leading to the expectation that individuals and businesses should always be available. So what happens when your business suffers an outage or gets stuck in the middle of a storm? Thanks to cloud computing, you can plan for these disasters by creating easy-to-implement disaster recovery plans. Geo-redundancy is one way to maintain business continuity, even in a disaster.

Geo-Redundancy for Business Continuity

When organizations separate or spread servers across multiple data centers, they increase the chances of business continuity during outages, catastrophic events, and natural disasters. Implementing geo-redundancy between data centers ensures that critical business applications and data remains secure and accessible. It does so by replicating essential data as well as IT and VoIP infrastructure. Then, it stores it in these different centers for safekeeping.

Let’s look at how VoIP geo-redundancy can help businesses continue communicating in the face of disaster.

What is VoIP Geo-Redundancy?

Geo-redundancy is the distribution of important components or infrastructures across multiple centers in different locations. If your primary location (headquarter) fails, geo-redundancy provides a safety net.

VoIP geo-redundancy (also known as VoIP failover) does this for your business VoIP phone system. It acts as a backup in case your primary location endures a disaster or outage that impacts business continuity.

So, what is the purpose of VoIP geo-redundancy?

VoIP geo-redundancy can help maintain business continuity and keep your business phone system running, even in a disaster. If your main phone system fails due to hardware, networking, power, or other issues, calls can failover or forward to another location.

This way, your business can continue communicating with customers and vendors while keeping your data and systems safe.

How to Set Up VoIP Geo-Redundancy?

There are a few ways to set up VoIP geo-redundancy for your business phone system:

1. Build redundancy into your network and its elements (routers, switches, access points, and so on).
2. Support your LAN infrastructure with appropriate backup power along with secondary and tertiary internet connections.
3. Include legacy connections like PRIs or modern phone connections like SIP trunks in your disaster recovery plan.
4. Get a highly-redundant VoIP service provider with 99.999% uptime who can continue providing service.
5. Set incoming calls to automatically forward to a different location or team if your main office is unavailable.

As you can see, there are a few different ways you can include geo-redundancy with your VoIP systems. And businesses that use cloud phone systems will have an easier time implementing these strategies than on-premise systems.

Top 7 Benefits of VoIP Geo-Redundancy

VoIP geo-redundancy is a top business priority, especially in this digital age, because of the countless benefits it can bring to businesses:

1. High Availability Services

High-availability phone service can guarantee 99.99% uptime. This way, you can continue to operate your business with little to no downtime or recovery time while ensuring data integrity. Want to know more about our highly redundant service? Learn more about the Global Call Forwarding network.

2. Multiple Redundancy Use Cases

Here are some common VoIP geo-redundancy use cases:

• Network — Install additional network devices and phone lines, increasing network availability.
• Power — Support your IT infrastructure with a backup power supply, including UPS devices and generators.
• Colocation — Have geographical distance between two physical locations so that operations can be failed over to the other location to maintain business continuity.

3. Plan for Disaster Recovery

Whether affected by natural disasters, power outages, or a sudden war, you can keep your business running by planning ahead. Re-route services to a functional data center or backup distributed teams.

4. Maintain Business Continuity

When you use services with high availability and plan for disaster recovery, you create a structured approach for unplanned circumstances. This ensures that critical data and applications remain safe while your business operates efficiently.

5. Improved User Latency

You can even have data centers or points of presence (POPs) located near your end-users to reduce delays and improve response times. And since the distance between servers and users decreases, you can increase and maintain high call quality, improving the caller experience.

6. Build Efficient Systems

With geo-redundancy, you can build an efficient business phone system with advanced call management and other UC capabilities. Control and manage call traffic to achieve maximum performance with the highest voice quality.

7. Affordable and Scalable

More importantly, VoIP redundancy brings affordability and scalability to your business. Using a system like this allows you to upgrade and add new software or applications without risking downtime. You can even use geo-redundancy to support your remote and distributed teams, making physical distance less of a hurdle. The best part? These upgrades come with little to no costs as your teams and operations grow.

Related: Modernizing Legacy Phone Systems: How and Why to Upgrade?

VoIP Redundancy with Global Call Forwarding

VoIP geo-redundancy is essential to protecting your cloud phone system. It not only ensures your business remains “active” and “available” at all times but also safeguards data and applications. It’s not too late to get started.

High call quality and network reliability drives our global voice service – enabling businesses to connect with customers no matter their location. We also have multiple POPs across the Americas and APAC and an in-house-built secure voice communication app compatible with all platforms. Additionally, we can help you set up failover plans for your business phone system via advanced call routing, intelligent IVR, international call forwarding, and more.

Want to know how we can support your redundancy plans? Speak with our telecom experts today; call us at +1 (561) 908-6171 or chat with us online!

Enterprise Connect (EC) 2022 just took place from March 21-24, 2022.

This year’s expo was fantastic with a wonderfully decorated floor plan, an absolutely stacked speaker panel, and cutting-edge technologies abound. There was great energy in the air as attendees returned from a nearly three-year hiatus.

While there was a lot going on — between the huge turnout, industry-leading panel speakers, delightful booth stunts, and corporate swag — several trends and takeaways stood out among the rest.

What is Enterprise Connect?

Enterprise Connect (EC) is a business show that brings together corporate IT decision-makers with industry vendors, UC analysts, and telecom consultants. People attend Enterprise Connect to learn about new technologies and discuss issues related to business communications.

For over 30 years, EC has been the leading conference and expo for enterprise communications and collaboration in North America. It takes place at the Gaylord Palms Resort and Convention Center in Orlando.

For those unfamiliar with the event, everyone “who’s who” in the North American business communications space usually attends.

4 Major Themes from EC 2022

After a few years of virtual events, EC finally returned to an in-person conference in 2022. And as you might expect, some communications technologies improved exponentially since the last in-person event.

These were the four major themes at Enterprise Connect 22:

Contact Center AI

Contact centers everywhere are looking to scale down their workforce by automating certain repetitive processes.

Automation isn’t only happening in the contact center space, though. If you go into pretty much any supermarket, grocery store, fast food joint, etc., you’ll see many instances of jobs becoming automated.

At Enterprise Connect, AI communications vendors got to showcase their latest robots, voice avatars, and messaging bots.

Some of the voice robots at the show were able to interpret speech and respond intelligently in a humanlike voice. Others were able to parse SMS strings and translate inbound text messages into coffee orders.

That being said, humans aren’t being totally replaced in businesses and contact centers just yet.

Soft skills will always be needed. A human element is still necessary in the case of escalations and for handling more complicated requests.

But, simple and repetitive over-the-phone processes benefit from becoming more automated, and in many cases, they already have.

Conversation Analytics

Because I work closely with our customer-facing teams here, conversation analytics was the most interesting trend for me at Enterprise Connect 22.

I often overhear inside sales and support calls and listen to call recordings through our internal systems. But rather than relying on these small sample sizes of overheard phone calls, conversation intelligence enables business people to tap into larger amounts of data to understand phone conversations and video meetings at scale.

Imagine sifting through keywords to understand what prospective customers are calling about, instead of sitting on a chaotic sales floor. The training opportunities for sales leaders are immense, while marketers and business analysts gain more access to big data.

For example, you can cherry-pick certain keywords that you’re promoting from a marketing standpoint, actually see how often those keywords were discussed along with their sentiment, and then replay specific parts of those conversations.

Or, as a sales leader, you can see how often sellers veer away from their talk tracks. Or, for customer support and product development, you can see what’s working and what needs to be improved.

Conversation analytics lets you listen to specific conversations from anywhere in the world, and not just from inside a contact center — which is especially important as teams are becoming more distributed globally.

This EC 22 trend is actually already available in a lot of messaging and email apps. It’s a newer technology in the voice communications space.

For one, voice analytics and intelligence require accurate transcriptions. Vendors in this space might compete on how many different languages and dialects their NLP can interpret.

Second, it helps to have an intuitive interface to search through conversations and access specific parts of a recording, along with an easy-to-use dashboard for displaying relevant information.

Multichannel

Omnichannel and embedded communications were a major theme at Enterprise Connect 2022.

New technologies enable contact center operators to escalate phone calls into video meetings. This is less of a priority for brands dealing in emerging markets, which have lower smartphone penetration and slower mobile speeds.

Still, consumers want to interact with brands through their preferred channels. For some, this means SMS and messaging. Others still prefer phone conversations in this day and age.

Businesses and contact center professionals want to interact with customers across multiple channels on a single platform. This means support agents should be able to read and reply to messages, make and receive calls, and much more through a unified contact center solution. In the past, people needed to use different technologies for each.

Vendors will either provide prebuilt solutions with all of these functions or allow businesses to access different channels through APIs.

Omnichannel isn’t an entirely new trend, but has accelerated significantly in recent years and was very present at Enterprise Connect this year.

Interoperability

Modern buyers want their new software to seamlessly integrate with the other tools in their tech stack. It’s no longer the case where service providers can just offer up an API for buyers to build out their own integrations.

It’s been a communications trend for a while, but voice and messaging integrations continue to prove valuable.

Some tools like Ferdi allow you to combine your favorite messaging apps into one place. Others let you use their service natively within another application, like CRM dialers. Finally, wholesale telco vendors at EC were promoting their API capabilities, for example, for access to their virtual inventories.

Businesses now expect turnkey integrations across their most frequently used applications.

5 Other Takeaways from Enterprise Connect 2022

While the four themes above were the most important at Enterprise Connect this year, I left the show with several other key takeaways. Some are recurring themes, while others have sprouted up in recent years.

Sales Tools

This one builds on top of AI automation, interoperability, multichannel, and conversation intelligence.

First off, we have a long way to go before AI replaces salespeople. Robots might take the places of humans for basic functions, but talented salespeople are irreplaceable. Human salespeople are here to stay.

If you’re still blasting out robocalls with a recording, just stop. You’re going to annoy potential customers, and as a result of STIR/SHAKEN, you probably won’t even be able to properly deliver calls soon.

So, these sales tools are centered less around sales replacement and more around sales enablement.

Power dialers, auto-dialers, click-to-call, and sales integrations have been around forever. But, analytics for coaching was a big trend at Enterprise Connect.

Especially with in-person sales teams becoming more distributed, it’s more important than ever for sales leaders to have the right tools to understand what their reps are saying.

Remote Work

Enterprise Connect had plenty of panels on this topic. I’m not going to speculate on which technologies will emerge and how this will look in the long run, but it’s sure to include some combination of augmented and virtual reality.

However, based on my conversations, it’s clear that talent retention will be much harder — if not impossible — for companies that are not flexible about work from home and asynchronous work. In addition, the most talented minds prefer to work based on output rather than time spent.

And since most businesses have been working remotely the last few years, remote work was a big theme at Enterprise Connect this year.

And following this wave of companies working remotely are better monitoring tools for remote employees — especially in customer-facing roles that rely on a high level of activity and availability.

Another big takeaway from Enterprise Connect 2022 was the number of call tracking tools and innovation within workforce efficiency management software.

Customer Acquisition

Customer acquisition costs across all industries are going through the roof. Businesses are looking to diversify the channels through which they acquire customers. Trade show expenditures surely decreased throughout the pandemic, while the costs to acquire customers through digital channels skyrocketed.

With the return of in-person events, it was interesting to see the budgets that various brands were allocating to their booths.

Tour the Enterprise Connect show floor in 12 seconds! #EC22 @enterprisecon pic.twitter.com/wQOSsIfxyZ

— Tom Brannen (@tbrannen) March 23, 2022

There were some really spectacular designs and giveaways. And at the same time, the designs for other booths looked straight out of the early 2000s.

There also didn’t seem to be much correlation between booth sizes, profitability, and network strength. Some legacy operators turning huge profits had more modest booths while other less highly-regarded providers had massive, costly displays.

Enterprise Connect Mainly Targets North America

Attendees of this event were mainly English speakers, which makes sense as the conference was hosted in Orlando, Florida. On top of that, the United States telecom market is highly developed and has fewer restrictions compared to other international markets.

And you know what they say: money talks. Most huge corporate budgets are concentrated in the USA and other English-speaking countries like the UK, Canada, and Australia. That’s why there were some exhibitors from Ireland and the United Kingdom. But there weren’t many from emerging economies.

This got me thinking: what are the biggest enterprise communications and collaboration conferences in Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America?

GITEX was more diverse, hosting attendees throughout EMEA, but it was less focused on communications than technology in general.

So many markets exist besides the English-speaking countries. And due to the nature of cloud services, vendors can provide services from anywhere. There is also potential for business expansion in more diverse conferences.

Call Quality Monitoring

There are so many fly-by-night companies in this space. We’ve been around since 1996, but the newer companies popping up seem to use unreliable, low-cost routes to save costs on their end.

In order to scale your customer base and support model, the voice quality of your global calls must be crystal clear.

Luckily, there were some vendors at Enterprise Connect like Spearline who help companies with proactive number testing and quality assurance.

Final Thoughts on EC 2022

Overall, Enterprise Connect 2022 was exceptionally well put together. It would have been nice to stay longer and attend more keynote sessions, but the conversations I had with partners, friends, and analysts were invaluable.

Special shoutout to Ryan Daily and the No Jitter team for putting this together. They gathered a really impressive group of analysts and industry leaders and presented the telecom industry with new insights and goals.

I look forward to watching these Enterprise Connect trends continue to grow in the near future.

Dropped calls, inaccessibility, and high calling costs are unacceptable when it comes to enterprise communications. Without high-quality voice, your business will have a hard time connecting with essential customers and vendors. The answer to this problem is simple. Your business requires a phone service provider that can support your communication needs and traffic. And that’s where VoIP termination comes in.

In this post, we’ll go over what VoIP termination and origination services are and how to find the right provider for your business.

Understand VoIP and Voice Termination

Think of VoIP calls as having two endpoints. The origination end is where calls are placed, while the termination end is where receivers are being called.

In reality, making and receiving voice calls are two separate services, even if you use one device for both. And since they are different services, your VoIP origination and VoIP termination providers don’t have to be the same.

To fully understand how VoIP calling works, we must first understand how VoIP calls are connected and terminated. Once you get the basics down, you can determine which termination or origination providers best suit your needs.

What is VoIP Origination?

VoIP origination refers to incoming calling. The term ‘VoIP origination’ simply refers to the process of handling the originating call (incoming call) and delivering it to the receiver (your business). In other words, it focuses on how a phone call is placed and how it travels to the receiver.

So — even though the wording is confusing — your business is not actually placing or originating the call. Instead, your provider receives the call and routes it to your business phone number without any obstacles. This means, you need a valid and functioning phone number to facilitate voice origination services and receive calls.

What is VoIP Termination?

In short, VoIP termination is outbound calling. VoIP call termination is the process of routing phone calls from one provider (usually a VoIP network) to another provider (PSTN or VoIP networks) until the recipient receives them. It is the process of delivering outgoing calls to the numbers dialed. While you do not need a phone number to send or terminate calls, you need a voice termination service.

VoIP termination is also called voice termination and call termination. And providers offering this service are called VoIP termination providers or voice termination providers.

How to Choose the Best VoIP Termination Provider

A VoIP termination provider or termination carrier is a telecom provider that offers voice and call termination services — the ability to place outbound voice calls to your receiver’s phone numbers.

Since origination and termination are different services, the providers are not always the same. There are plenty of providers out there. So, it is important to understand what each provider offers and how their services can help you build an efficient phone system. Most VoIP termination providers deliver the following:

• High-quality voice calls
• Intelligent call routing
• Security and redundancy
• Centralized call management

When choosing a VoIP termination provider, you need to keep a few factors in mind.

1. Cost and Value

In most cases, your call termination provider decides how to route your calls, pays for that service, and charges you a markup. So, they can decide to use least cost routing (LCR) for a more cost-effective service while still charging you high calling rates. Low-cost routes lead to low-quality audio – which causes dropped calls, muffled audio, delays, and more. Opt for a provider that is transparent about their services and networks.

2. Infrastructure and Network

Additionally, your provider may use network partners to route calls outside their own VoIP infrastructure, especially for long-distance and international calling. But if they work with low-grade carriers instead of reliable routes, that can also impact call quality.

On top of that, routing calls over multiple layers can also affect call quality and security. So, it’s important to understand what carriers they work with and how they route their calls.

3. Access and Controls

Ideally, your voice termination provider gives you full admin privileges to route and manage calls when you receive them. Different providers offer different levels of access control. So, it is important to understand if your provider can accommodate your routing needs.

You can always reach out to your provider’s tech support team to understand what this will look like for your business. With Global Call Forwarding, you can manage advanced routing for different numbers, phone lines, and offices, all through an intuitive, online control panel.

4. Availability

You also want to find a provider with high redundancy and failover support. This way, you have backups set up in case your primary system fails due to outages, server failures, natural disasters, and so on. With VoIP geo-redundancy, you can get your phone system back up and running quickly, with little to no downtime.

5. Features and Flexibility

Each provider offers different features and functionalities with their phone service. Now, you may not need all of these features, but some essential features include:

• Advanced routing
• Local, toll-free, and international phone numbers
• Caller ID management and local caller ID
• Softphone for outbound calls

So, it is a good idea to list down core features needed and filter through to find providers who can support your needs.

VoIP Termination with Global Call Forwarding

Global Call Forwarding offers VoIP termination through our Outbound Calling service. We provide high-quality termination to PSTN, VoIP, and mobile networks or GSM. Our diverse and highly-available voice network of local and international providers enables us to offer local, toll-free, and international calling at competitive rates.

With our geo-redundant network paired with Tier-1 carriers, you can experience high-quality calls with fewer hops. This creates a better call experience for all users.

Why Your Business Needs Call Termination?

Voice termination lets you place high-quality outbound calls from any location or device. You can even customize your outgoing caller ID to display specific phone numbers. This lets you personalize the way you reach out to different customers and vendors around the globe and increase response rates.

So, why do you need VoIP termination and what do you get with the service?

Global Call Forwarding offers the following with our Outbound Calling service:

• Termination of local, interstate, and international calls
• Full geo-redundancy with multiple data centers and POPs
• International SIP trunking
• Caller ID management
• Receive calls back on desired numbers
• Integrate with your existing phone system
• Access to our Softphone
• Consolidate all voice services into one global telephony platform
• 24/7 responsive customer support
• Dedicated account management
• Multiple pricing plans starting at $25/month

Scale Globally with Global Voice Termination

From small businesses to large enterprises, every type of business requires inbound and outbound voice calling for their corporate and satellite offices spread across the globe. Use our service to add global voice coverage to your business phone system.

Chat with our telecom experts to find a suitable solution for your business communication needs. Call us at +1 (561) 908-6171 or request a demo.

When you’re running a call center, managing calls effectively is of the utmost importance. But, to successfully manage calls, you need to determine the type of call center you are running. Specifically, will your call center focus on inbound or outbound calls?

Call centers with inbound and outbound services serve different purposes and therefore need different approaches. Let’s compare inbound and outbound call centers by discussing definitions, features, and differences. This will help you determine what call center software and solutions fit your needs.

Understanding Inbound and Outbound Call Centers

It is essential to understand the type of call center you run — this will help address communication needs, implement new protocols, measure success, and more. Additionally, inbound and outbound call centers require different cloud-based call center software and features to communicate with callers effectively.

Let’s dive in!

What is an Inbound Call Center?

“Inbound” refers to incoming calls — calls coming into your business. Inbound call centers focus on receiving incoming calls from customers and prospects. In other words, agents wait for users to contact them instead of vice versa.

Most call centers with inbound services specialize in customer support, as the majority of calls come from existing buyers. These typically involve questions about the service, troubleshooting assistance, or product issues. But, they sometimes also include inbound sales, where interested prospects call to learn more about a business’ products or services.

Inbound Call Center Features

Successful customer service at inbound call centers occurs when agents respond to customer situations and quickly identify the best possible solution. So, what types of tools help teams achieve this?

Let’s take a look at these 3 essential inbound call center software features:

1. Advanced IVR (Auto-Attendant) – This cloud communication tool automatically answers all incoming calls and routes callers to their desired department or agent. It can also assist callers with simple tasks and provide general company information.

Cloud IVR systems increase your inbound call center’s efficiency and help avoid customer frustration, by reducing repeat calls and hold times.

2. Call Flow Builder – Use this tool to visualize and build call flows according to your call center’s evolving needs. This feature enables complete control over the way inbound calls travel through your system. So, you can manage your incoming calls more efficiently and improve the caller’s experience. You can even create custom call flows for different clients and offer more personalized experiences.

3. Routing Strategies – With advanced routing capabilities, you can effectively manage and distribute your call center’s inbound calls. Since these preset strategies or “rules” are managed in the cloud, you can modify or scale them to your call center’s growth as necessary.

Integrate strategies like Round Robin routing and Time of Day routing to improve customer satisfaction and balance your team’s workload. Or, use techniques like Failover Forwarding or Find Me Follow Me to ensure you never miss calls again.

Related: Call Center Trends in 2023

What is an Outbound Call Center?

An outbound call center is essentially the opposite of an inbound one. “Outbound” refers to outgoing calls. Outbound agents proactively call consumers and prospects instead of waiting for customers to contact them.

Typically, call centers for outbound services specialize in quality sales, brand awareness, and effective cold-calling. And, these calls usually revolve around prospecting, upselling, offering upgrades or renewals, and promotions. Sometimes representatives also use outgoing calls to conduct surveys and collect market research.

Related: 11 Tips to Improve Your Outbound Calls Strategy

Outbound Call Center Features

The main goal of agents at call centers with outbound calls is to generate leads, target users, and drive sales growth. So, are there any features that help outbound agents reach their goals?

Here are 3 beneficial features for outbound call centers:

1. Caller ID Management – This cloud telephony feature allows you to hide or mask your outgoing caller ID with another phone number. You can also choose to display a country-specific caller ID when making calls to customers around the world.

By displaying a familiar, local caller ID, you encourage users to answer, increasing sales and revenue. Caller ID management also protects an agent’s caller information when working remotely or on the go.

2. GCF Softphone – A softphone is a web-based dialer that enables you to make outbound calls from anywhere in the world to anywhere in the world. Most softphones are compatible with PCs, tablets, and smartphones. They make connecting teams across multiple locations or reaching out to international customers effortless. Additionally, they include features like in-network calling, attended call transfer, and voicemail. If your call center needs a cost-effective solution with UC capabilities and a quick installation time, consider using a softphone.

The GCF softphone is also capable of receiving calls. However, most providers only offer this service if you have an outbound calling plan.

3. Call Detail Records – Call detail records log important details about the calls on your system. Learn more about your customers’ calling behavior, pain points, preferences, and more using call records.

This information allows you to craft a more personalized and enhanced customer experience, leading to a growth in sales. Additionally, you can analyze call data to identify quality leads and new target markets.

Call Centers with Inbound vs Outbound Services: 3 Major Differences

The difference between call centers with inbound or outbound services comes down to three primary functions – call direction, overall goals, and call center software.

1. Direction

Of course, the first major difference is how most calls in your center travel. Inbound call centers have a majority of incoming calls. And, call centers with outbound services have mostly outgoing calls. The types of services you want to offer determine your call flow. Sales and outreach will need an outbound call center solution to manage outgoing calls and cold-calling. On the other hand, customer service will require an inbound call center to handle incoming calls.

2. Purpose and Goals

Second, the main goal and purpose of call centers with inbound services differ from those with outbound services. Inbound call center agents primarily offer support to existing clients. Whereas outbound reps usually concentrate on generating leads and targeting customers for sales. So, strategies, prompts, software features, and success measurement will vary at either call center.

3. Call Center Software

The third significant difference between call centers with inbound and outbound services is technology and software requirements. For instance, inbound call centers need features like advanced IVR or auto-attendants for call management. And, outbound call centers require dialers for placing outgoing calls.

But, simply supplying inbound call centers with a dialer or outbound centers with an IVR makes these tools less effective. This is because they don’t fit the primary purpose of each call center. That’s where you will need a solution that combines services of both types of call centers.

Enter: blended call centers.

Blended Call Centers

If your business requires both inbound and outbound call center capabilities, you don’t have to choose one or the other. Blended call centers, also known as hybrid centers, help your company provide both incoming and outgoing communications through one channel. By centralizing your business communication in one call center, you create a more consistent customer experience.

In addition to the features previously discussed, blended call center reps benefit from cloud call center features — like recordings, integrations, and analytics — that work for both types of calls. For example, call recording can improve productivity and works as a great training tool, which is useful for sales and support teams. And CRM software integrations can also open your system’s functionality and efficiency.

Choosing The Best Call Center Software for Your Business

Whether you’re running a call center with inbound, outbound, or blended services, you need the right call center software. Consider your communication goals and budget when choosing the best call center services for your business.

A reliable VoIP provider, like Global Call Forwarding, offers your call center access to advanced call features and tools to create a phone system that fits your needs. Call center software for inbound and outbound services comes with any of our cloud phone number plans.

Call us at +1 (561) 908-6171 or request a demo to learn more about our services and what we can do for you!

It’s no secret that collaboration and communication are two driving forces behind any well-functioning sales or customer support team. Your reps need to be able to communicate with others (co-workers, supervisors, managers, etc.) when the time arises. And in some cases, they may need to collaborate with others during a call with a customer. The ability to quickly add someone to the call saves time and moves the process (closing the sale or support ticket) along smoothly. That’s when having 3-way calling within your cloud phone system comes in handy.

What is 3-Way Calling?

3-way calling is a call management feature that allows you to add another person to an ongoing call. Other common terms for 3-way calling include call merging, conference calling, or call conferencing. To do this, you will have to initiate the second call and then merge the two calls together.

There have traditionally been a few different ways to add another person to a call:

• Conference call numbers or codes
• 3rd-party services
• Call waiting, and so on.

But these resulted in reduced call quality and confusing mechanisms. It sometimes even led to the first call being dropped.

To solve these issues, phone service providers have made it easier to merge calls, leading to the birth of the 3-way calling feature.

Benefits of 3-Way Conference Calls

So, how can your business use 3-way calling? When conferencing with others, you can:

• Collaborate internally on projects within customer service and sales teams
• Conduct quick virtual meetings with important decision-makers
• Offer more responsive service by getting help and support quickly
• Save time on having two separate calls or meetings by having just one
• Train new employees by showing them how to respond in certain situations
• Boost customer satisfaction and caller experience by cutting down wait times and long transfers
• Have faster and more efficient meetings and conversations
• Increase first call resolution rates
• Converse and collaborate across different departments, locations, and devices.

Call merging helps your teams connect and work together towards a common goal: improving your business’ sales and customer support initiatives. And with a cloud phone service provider, your teams can do this even during remote work periods.

How to Get 3-Way Calling with Global Call Forwarding?

You can get 3-way calling with any phone service provider. Global Call Forwarding offers a variety of call management features and services along with our virtual phone number plans.

If you are a Global Call Forwarding customer, you don’t need conferencing numbers or codes to engage in a three-way call conference. You simply need an Outbound Calling plan. Then, you can download the GCF softphone and use the Merge feature to add another person to your ongoing call.

Get Outbound Calling and other advanced business communication features with Global Call Forwarding. Call us at +1 (561) 908-6171 or chat with our telecom experts today!