Phones are an interesting business.

It’s the one business technology that people seem to almost want to be boring. In fact, if you can think of a way to make phones or PBX management more boring, there are some competitors who would likely be interested in talking with you. On the other hand, if you like technologies to be intuitive, rich, pretty, and even—dare I say it—fun, then pause your game of fruit ninja and check this out.

With any other phone system, you decide how a phone call routes with either a drop-down menu, an automatic default, or a call to your system administrator. B-O-R-I-N-G. Not to mention it takes forever. You definitely wouldn’t call it fun. With Jive, you open up our signature Visual Dial Plan Editor, and drag and drop the elements to the call flow exactly as you’d like them to happen.

Think of the possibilities.

First, there’s the classic “we’re-legit.”

click to enlarge

Someone calls in, they get a call menu (auto-attendant), then they can hear company info, listen through the directory, jump to an extension for business requests/solicitations, or leave a voicemail.  Professional. Keep in mind you can record your own greetings using your regular phone. They save as sound clips, so you can switch them out whenever you want. Think holiday greetings galore.

How about a fax line?

Piece of cake. I set a timer. Took me 6.4 seconds. Best part is, this dial plan is just connected to an extension, so you don’t pay anything for a separate fax line.

Let’s get a little creative—how about a completely automated business machine?

Say you sell a simple product and all you really need is people to be able to call in and leave their information—or even make an order on the phone without you having to answer. You could do it for less than you pay for your iPhone, and you wouldn’t even have to answer it.

Let’s make this plan detect if it’s a fax (you’ve got a fax-in order form on one of your promotions), then send the caller to some menu options. Whichever option they click, the system instantly alerts you on your website (thank you HTTP Notify node). This means when they choose the buy now option, it triggers an event on your website that sends them an email for where they can enter their credit card information. Your other products have their own different call options. The HTTP Notify nodes are all set to trigger an SMS message to your fulfillment team to let them know what the caller did, so without ever answering the phone you know what the caller wanted, and the system is automated to get it for them. You spend your time filling orders and planning new rubber duck designs.

This next one’s probably my personal favorite. I call it “the shaft”.

It’s pretty self explanatory. Has applications everywhere. I know some ladies who wish they had a dedicated line they could give out that did just this.

These aren’t presets. You just grab the elements you want, drag them onto the canvas, then connect them. The possibilities are endless. It might not beat Fruit Ninja, but it definitely beats trying to find your desk phone diagnostic manual, or waiting on hold for your “system administrator”.

Last but not least, they gave us this one as a challenge in our new employee training:

Yep, every new employee learns customer service and the Jive system before they get to “their real job” here. It was pretty intense, but Amanda (our trainer) says I passed.

All I’m sayin’ is…

All I’m saying is, if you’re thinking VoIP—and you should be—then why would you go with a vanilla provider when you can plan your dial plans like this? With Jive, you can map your call flows however you want them, and you can do it whenever you want, on however many extensions you want. If that were even possible on other plans, what would they charge for it? At Jive, it’s all a part of the standard seat price.

Give our inside sales team a call. They do live demos every week, and if you let them know what you’re looking for, they can even map out an example that equates to exactly what you’d like to see done in your organization.