For decades now, businesses of all sizes have been benefiting from voicemail as a means to capture important messages and stay connected with their customers, employees and vendors. With technological improvements there have been significant enhancements in this functionality to make it even more dynamic and helpful for business professionals. Now, let’s take this feature a step further and examine how you can use voicemail as a way to actually improve your productivity.

What better way to reduce the amount of time you spend checking your voicemail messages than to prevent the need for them to be left in the first place? Consider the fact that a good majority of calls placed to a business are to gather basic information, such as hours of operation, directions and details about upcoming events. If your callers receive answers to these common questions as soon as they connect with your business, they won’t even have to leave a message. Include all of this data in your custom greeting, along with your website URL, and encourage callers to visit for more information. This saves you time, improves customer satisfaction, and, as an added bonus, may result in an increase in traffic to your website.

Wouldn’t it be helpful if every message you received contained all the information you needed to move forward to the next step? Nothing is more time consuming and frustrating than filtering through messages that are missing key elements. This can easily be avoided if you clearly state what information you need in your voicemail greeting. Let callers know that they should include their name, contact information, best time they can be reached and ask them to state specifically what the purpose of their call is, so that you can be sure that the right party is the one who follows up. For instance, if the caller knows to indicate that they’re calling about a billing issue, as soon as you listen to the message, you’ll know to forward the message to someone in your accounting department, saving time for your business and improving customer care levels.

It can be an extraordinary waste of valuable time to have to sift through dozens of messages every time you need to locate something. Tools like visual voicemail eliminate this wasted effort by allowing you to retrieve your messages on your computer or mobile device. Read transcripts of your messages instantly and organize them just as you would email. You can even forward messages you receive to other members of your team to manage follow-up more efficiently. Not only does this help you by saving time, but when you can organize your messages, you will reduce the risk of something important slipping through the cracks.

Voicemail is a powerful and essential tool in today’s business world. By leveraging these helpful tips, you can harness this technology to improve your productivity, and get the most out of your valuable time.