Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year From pascom
2023 has flown by and 2024 is just around the corner which means that it’s that time of year again when we wish all our customers, partners, and users a very Merry Christmas and a happy New Year.
As is customary at this time of year, we would like to thank all our customers, partners, users and colleagues for their continued loyalty and trust in us and our solutions throughout 2023. Before we say farewell to 2023, we would also like to take this opportunity to provide you all with some important information regarding support, tips for managing your phone system during the holidays and how to catch up with pascom at upcoming events in January.
Technical Support & Christmas Opening Times
The pascom Support team will be available as normal (with reaction times according to SLA) throughout the Christmas / New Year break, meaning our pascom customers will still be able to access our support services throughout the holidays. For response times, please refer to your pascom Service Level Agreement.
For all other enquiries, the pascom offices will be closed from Friday 22nd December and will reopen again on Tuesday 2nd January 2024 at which point, our team will ready and raring to go.
Get Your Business Communications Fit for The Holidays & Beyond
As is always the case at this time of year, it is important to make sure that your phone system is setup according to the holiday season. So, as we the holidays and New Year period approaches, businesses of all shapes and sizes must prepare their business communications platform for the festive season and beyond. Depending on your business model, this will entail a number of changes to the normal configuration:
Business Hours, Public Holiday Calendar Checks & Prompts
If your business hours change or services/departments close for the holidays, then you will need to update your opening hours and time checks to reflect your business hours during the Christmas / New Year period.
To do this, simply log in to your phone system admin UI and follow the instructions as described in our documentation.
Once you’ve got your calendars and business hours checks sorted, it is time to update your phone system prompts and music on hold to match the holiday season. A tip from us is to share the festive cheer this year with warm season greetings and some appropriate music on hold as well as to provide additional information such as opening hours in your prompts - just be sure to check for any music licensing requirements.
Update All Your Communications Channels
While your business phone system is central to how you communicate with customers, it is not your only communication channel, so be sure to update, change and modify your messaging across all channels as appropriate. For example, any auto responders that you use for online chat such as Messenger etc will need to updated to greet your customers and provide them with the appropriate information they need.
There are things than are easy to do and make a big difference when it comes to managing customer expectations and experiences but are often forgotten.
Automatic “Out of Office” E-Mails
Setting up good automatic out of office e-mail replies is a great way to share information with customers who e-mail you. To make them effective, your auto reply must give the customer all the information they need in a friendly and informative manner. Therefore, your auto reply should contain the dates that you are unavailable when you are back and information on what to do if the enquiry is urgent and can’t wait until your return to the office.
As you would expect, most businesses are pretty good at posting their best wishes for the holiday season - they don’t want to appear as Scrooge or Grampus etc. However, posting information regarding opening hours & tips for customers who are trying to contact your business is something worth doing as it helps avoid customer disappointment. As discussed above, a great example is updating your Facebook Messenger auto responder.
Update Your Google Opening Hours
This is one of my pet hates - how annoying is it when you google a company for contact and opening information, only to find that the information hasn’t been updated and you’re left in the lurch. Updating your My Business google listing is simple and can be done in less than five minutes. Therefore, you have no excuses for keeping this information up-to-date and not just at Christmas!
Future Proof Your Business Communications in 2024
Looking at the holidays and beyond, for many businesses the Christmas break provides IT admins and phone system managers with the ideal time to plan and implement a number of optimisations. Once again, this year has been a year of change within the IT landscape with Hybrid Working, Cloud Communications, Mobile VoIP Apps and Video Conferencing all continuing to grow in the world of business communications. For many businesses, 2023 has been consolidation year whereby they have been replacing the stop gap solutions they adopted between 2020 and 2022 with all-in-one solutions that they can rely on a permanent basis going forward. In particular, we’ve noticed a significant uptake in complete solutions including SIP trunking services, meaning that businesses are looking not only to replace old or stop gap solutions, but are looking for to consolidate their tech stack to the minimum of solution providers. This trend looks set to continue into 2024 meaning that for businesses with lower call volumes and demand over the holidays can use this period to update and upgrade their infrastructure and solutions before 2024 kicks-off.
The benefits of adopting an all-in-one business communications solution are as far reaching as they are varied. Firstly, all-in-one solutions simplify your life in that you only have one platform to manage and your users only one app to use. This will also help reduce and minimise the threat posed by shadow IT. Next, if your boss loves fancy new stuff, they will love having the latest fancy stuff in one app. Plus, they will see a rise in employee productivity. Finally, your accounts team will likely thank you for reducing the number of monthly invoices they have to process which has the added benefit of making your decision look great on the balance sheet.
So if your business experiences a lull over the Christmas period, then this is the perfect time to try and test.
Upcoming Events
Regardless of whether you are a pascom customer, partner, or pascom mobile / desktop client user, 2024 will provide you with plenty of opportunities to catch up with us as we hit the road running.
First up, we have our regular monthly reseller partner briefing on the 10th of January. As a pascom partner, you will receive an email in the first week of January 2024 with information on how to register.
Next, the 11th of January sees our weekly pascom BOOTCAMP webinars returning after the Christmas / New Year break and we can’t wait to see lots of pascom phone system customers, partners, and prospects joining us as we kick-off 2024.
To round off an action-packed start to year, you can meet the pascom team in person at the TAXArena expo in Hannover on February 28th, where we will be show casing how pascom ONE helps tax advisors, in particular DATEV users, upgrade their business communications.
For more info on pascom events, please visit our events page:
pascom Events
We’re here to help
If you have any queries about pascom phone system features and how to use them, then check out some more Video Collaboration posts as well as our desktop client, mobile app and web client user guides listed in our documentation.
If you, your team, your colleagues, or customers could benefit from an effective all-in-one video and business collaboration solution, then we’re here to help. Just give us a call on +49 991 291691 0 and get started with our free cloud phone system edition.
Wishing you a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year 2024!