Nextiva is the future-of-work software company that helps sales, service, and marketing teams achieve higher productivity and deliver better customer engagement. Nextiva’s cloud-based platform brings together business communications applications, intelligence, and automation to help companies build deeper connections with customers and manage all conversations and relationships in one place.
This month, we’ve got productivity hacks you can start using right away. Meanwhile, your team is over there wondering how you get so much done in a day.
Work in peace with Do not disturb
Deadline looming? Recording a video? Get off the grid and get into deep focus mode for as long as you need.
Select Do not disturb in your profile and choose how long you want to introvert.
Call hold options
How about finishing this right now, the easy way?
Put the call on hold till you figure out who needs to be patched in. Or maybe even find that one special person that has the answer on the tip of their tongue.
From an on-hold call, you can now both transfer the call or start a conference with others.
Highlight to call
Oops, sorry, I must have dialed the wrong number. That doesn’t have to be you anymore. Eliminate manual dialing and have the App do the work for you.
Now, when you’re in NextivaONE, you can just drag your mouse to highlight a phone number and click the hotkeys (on Mac: command + shift + D and on Windows: control + shift + D) and NextivaONE will automatically dial that number.
This was just a pinch of what we’ve been up to. To see what else you can now do, check out our Product Update page.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sarah Skidd
Sarah Skidd is a Product Marketing Manager for Nextiva. Former small business owner and mom of a bunch of kids, Sarah’s a mix of strategist and boots-on-the-ground doer. Off the clock, she’ll sneak in a hike or bribe her kids to join her in Rummikub.
In an ever-changing industry like customer service, it can be easy to lose sight of the “why” that is at the core of what you do. To help reenergize you and your team, we’ve compiled a list of 121 inspiring quotes on customer service from industry experts.
We sourced words of wisdom from CX experts, customer service podcasts, and the blogs of industry movers and shakers to serve as a reminder of the importance of great customer service. We hope these quotes also provide insights into how you can create outstanding customer experiences within your own company.
After all, in the wise words of Sam Walton, “The goal of a company is to have customer service that is not just the best but legendary.”
Excellent customer service quotes to energize and ignite you
Providing excellent customer service is the key that will unlock endless success for your business. Share these quotes with your team to keep them energized and excited about their work.
“Customers vote with their feet and decide if they will stay or leave based on their perception of how much we value them and how we treat them. And more are leaving every day just because of our inability to the basic blocking and tackling of delivering our products to them. Getting customers to love you has got to start with showing them the respect they deserve by making it painless and eventually a joy to do business with you.”
— Jeanne Bliss | Founder and CEO of Customer Bliss
“Send out a cheerful, positive greeting, and most of the time you will get back a cheerful, positive greeting. It’s also true that if you send out a negative greeting, you will, in most cases, get back a negative greeting.”
— Zig Ziglar | Author, salesman, and motivational speaker
“It’s important to have well-trained employees but let us not forget: If you don’t have customers, there is no need for employees.”
“Socially savvy, mobile-minded customers are the new black. NPS, revenues, and reputations will rise and fall according to how well organizations adapt to this challenge.”
When you’re trying to make an important decision, and you’re sort of divided on the issue, ask yourself: If the customer were here, what would she say?”
9. “Tough and uncertain times are one of the greatest opportunities to strengthen your relationship with your customers.”
— Paul Reilly | Professional speaker, sales trainer, and author of “Selling Through Tough Times”
10. “Customer data is the thread that connects all aspects of the CX strategy. It allows us to meet customers where they are with what they need. For years, we have been the beneficiary of increasing volumes of customer data. With the accelerated digital engagement journey of the past six months, we now have even more data at our disposal to understand key customer segments.”
— Mazen Ghalayini | Managing partner, digital product & experience lab leader at West Monroe
11. “It’s simple: Happy customers reward you with their loyalty. Exceptional customer service converts into customer loyalty. It converts into raving fans who will praise your team on Twitter, and Facebook, and talk about their experience over lunch with friends. There is no greater marketing for your product than happy, surprised, raving fans, and no reason you can’t start now.”
12. “When you are making a decision about how best to serve your customers, your own experience is often a better guide than a more sophisticated analysis of the market.”
13. “Be your own customer. Travel your customer journey, and look for quick fixes. I bet there’s one hanging over your head right now! A broken link, perhaps? Maybe it’s an outdated catalog item or a process that takes too long. You need not label it a ‘customer experience issue’ to get support from your organization. It’s broken! Make that one item a priority and fix it, then find another. The more speed bumps you remove, the better the journey will be for your customers.”
— Jeannie Walters | CEO and Chief Customer Experience Investigator with Experience Investigators
14. “Customer service is everything and anything that touches a customer ― directly or indirectly. Customer service means servicing customers, and it’s so much more than just solving problems or addressing complaints. Customer service is part of a holistic customer experience that is capable of providing a critical competitive advantage in today’s increasingly cluttered and commoditized marketplace.”
15. “[Companies] need to figure out that when you over-promise, you’re bound to under-deliver and lose customers’ trust and respect. But, if you under-promise and over-deliver, you just might gain a customer for life (not to mention a brand advocate whose going to tell her entire social network!)”
— Denise Lee Yohn | Brand leadership expert, speaker and author of “What Great Brands Do”
16. “If you want to make a good first impression, smile at people. What does it cost to smile? Nothing. What does it cost not to smile? Everything, if not smiling, prevents you from enchanting people.”
17. “I believe that all brands will become storytellers, editors and publishers, all stores will become magazines, and all media companies will become stores. There will be too many of all of them. The strongest ones, the ones who offer the best customer experience, will survive.”
18. “Customers today have an ‘I need it now’ approach. Customer service professionals need to know how to easily access information for them to understand the context of the customer’s concerns.”
Inspirational quotes from leaders in customer service
At times, customer service may feel like a thankless job. Help reignite your team’s passion for what they do by sharing words of wisdom from industry pros.
19. “What is necessary is to listen to your customers: understand their needs, expectations and jobs to be done, and design an experience that meets those needs.”
— Annette Franz | Founder and CEO of CX Journey Inc.
20. “Customers will never love a company until the employees love it first.”
30. “Making an emotional connection matters, because people — customers and employees — are emotional beings. We identify with others who connect with us emotionally — and we trust them more.”
— Denise Lee Yohn | Brand leadership expert, speaker and author of “What Great Brands Do”
31. “Customers want to bond with a brand on a deeper level. They want you to be their BFF, sherpa, and cheerleader all in one.”
— Charlene Walters | Author of “Launch Your Inner Entrepreneur: 10 Mindset Shifts for Women to Take Action, Unleash Creativity, and Achieve Financial Success”
32. “Customer expectations? Nonsense. No customer ever asked for the electric light, the pneumatic tire, the VCR, or the CD. All customer expectations are only what you and your competitor have led him to expect. He knows nothing else.”
33. “When your customer experience is memorable, you turn passive users into superfans. These are brand evangelists who are passionate about your values, offerings, and continued success. To tap into these superfans, you need to implement clear strategies that put your customers first.”
Who better to speak about the customer service industry than those that have helped pioneer the current gold standard of the customer experience? We’ve compiled a collection of quotes from industry experts to spark your own team’s creativity.
34. “In a world where products and services are becoming more and more commoditized, customer experience is the only true differentiator.”
— Annette Franz | Founder and CEO of CX Journey Inc.
35. “Realize that employees and the customers both have to be engaged, at the same time, to move your business forward for sustainable success.”
36. “A jigsaw puzzle is an extremely good analogy for the customer experience… you can only see the picture if you put the pieces together.”
— Ian Golding | CEO and Founder of Customer Experience Consultancy Ltd.
37. “If you want your employees to make it a habit to deliver outstanding customer service, you have to make it a habit to thank them when they do.”
— Bill Quiseng | Chief Experience Officer and speaker
38. “A brand is what a business does, reputation is what people remember.”
— Ted Rubin | Social Marketing Strategist, Author, and Speaker
39. “A lot of B2B companies are so focused on their product, that they forget that their company has a fantastic story to tell that they can share on platforms like LinkedIn or YouTube. A lot of B2B companies underestimate that sharing their experience with your customers will increase the bond in a more digital way.”
40. “The key is to set realistic customer expectations, and then not to just meet them, but to exceed them — preferably in unexpected and helpful ways.”
41. “You can’t transform something you don’t understand. If you don’t know and understand what the current state of the customer experience is, how can you possibly design the desired future state?”
— Annette Franz | Founder and CEO of CX Journey Inc.
42. “Customers are speaking to you implicitly via their behavior, captured in the footprints they leave behind in your systems.”
43. “It’s not the customer’s duty to be loyal to you; it’s your duty to be loyal to your customers. Focus on quality, relevancy, and the BEST customer service possible. Make sure your business is creating a service experience so good that it inspires loyalty.”
— Steve Maraboli | Keynote speaker and business consultant
44. “All the search engine optimization in the world can’t outweigh the impact of a successful and happy customer.”
46. “Leaders often say, ‘We’re just getting started with customer experience,’ but that’s a myth. CX has been happening as long as your organization has existed — with or without your attention and intention!”
— Jeannie Walters | CEO and Chief Customer Experience Investigator with Experience Investigators
47. “The most dangerous customers aren’t your haters; they are the ‘meh’ in the middle, the dissatisfied customers who don’t take the time to complain.”
— Jay Baer | CEO of Convince & Convert and best-selling author of six business books
48. “A great customer experience needs to be holistic as well as contextual.”
49. “My definition of a ‘customer centric’ culture is where people are asking the right questions to the right people, who are able and willing to collaborate to provide their insights. In such a culture, over time, individuals ask the right questions more often and get the right answers more often. This is a reinforcing feedback loop. As this culture takes hold, more and more of the solutions coming out of the group would yield positive customer experiences.”
— Secil Watson | Former EVP, Head of Digital Solutions for Business at Wells Fargo
50. “When a customer enters my store, forget me. He is king.”
— John Wanamaker | Merchant and founder of one of the first American department stores
51. “The question I get the most often when I walk off a physical stage, it’s always somebody from a B2B company. They’d come up to me and they’d say, ‘Oh great presentation. I was really inspired. Does what you talk about apply to B2B companies?’ And I kind of perfected this. With a very straight face I would say, ‘Well, that depends. Are you marketing to human beings?’ And then they’d be like, ‘Well, yeah.’ Then customer experience applies to you because the people that are buying your product are people.”
— Dan Gingiss | Customer experience speaker and author
52. “One big mistake we see in customer service is the assumed customer journey. An expected customer journey reflects the commercial perspective on what works and what does not. But it doesn’t capture the customers’ views, customer touch-points, or emotional drivers.”
— Tanya Ahmed | Digital marketer at Vantage Circle
53. “By automating time-consuming, repetitive tasks, you’re able to free up your CSMs to focus on customers. Customer success automation is beneficial because it eliminates human errors and minimizes wait time. However, the downside of automation is that it makes relationship building more challenging by excluding the human approach.”
— Gustavo Bianco | Head of Sales & Customer Success at Restream
Quotes on building and fostering customer relations
Relationship building is key to developing an impressive customer service reputation. Here are a few inspiring quotes to help remind you about the power of nurturing relationships with customers.
54. “Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves.”
— Steve Jobs | Co-founder and former chairman and CEO of Apple Inc.
55. “If you give customers a chance, they’ll communicate with you in many ways.”
56. “The key to forming loyalty lies in your Customer Experience, and more specifically in the memories your customers have of your Customer Experience. By minding how these memories are formed—in the peak and at the end of your experience — you can help customers remember your experience well.”
— Colin Shaw | Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy
57. “The tides of change have been working, and customers have realized they control the brand, not the company.”
— Frank Eliason | Consultant at Frank Eliason LLC, formerly Citi and Comcast
58. “The greatest technology in the world has not replaced the ultimate relationship building tool between a customer and a business — the human touch.”
— Shep Hyken | Chief Amazement Officer and speaker with Shepard Presentations LLC
59. “Every overlooked moment — those moments that leave the customer feeling a bit neglected instead of cared for, or those moments when they need information or support and can’t find it — matters. These are opportunities to deliver a positive experience and build that trust with the customer.”
— Jeannie Walters | CEO and Chief Customer Experience Investigator with Experience Investigators
60. “The customer is always right. But not every customer is right for you.”
61. “In this day and age, it is the business that knows how to woo and win the hearts of its customers that will eventually win their pockets.”
— J.N. Halm | Author of “Customer Romance: A New Feel of Customer Service”
62. “It’s easier to love a brand when the brand loves you back”
— Seth Godin | Entrepreneur, best-selling author, and speaker
63. “In this world, the people who interface between your organization and the customer are the single most important people. What they hear from the customer is the best intelligence that your organization has. And yet, if they’re existing in a world where they’re only told what to do, they don’t have any power to share what they heard, and you’ve lost a massive opportunity.”
64. “If people believe they share values with a company, they will stay loyal to the brand.”
— Howard Schultz | Co-founder of Schultz Family Foundation, formerly Starbucks
65. “I have come to realize that customers love companies that make them feel good about themselves — companies that reflect what they, the customers, believe about themselves. Customers fall in love with the company that says to them, ‘You are unique. You are great. We are the only ones who can make you feel that way. Fall in love with us and we will continue to make you feel great.’”
— J.N. Halm | Author of “Customer Romance: A New Feel of Customer Service”
66. “Your target customers have to love you more than they hate change. And people really hate change.”
— Erika Hall | Co-founder and Director of Strategy at Mule Design Studio
67. “The toughest thing about the power of trust is that it’s very difficult to build and very easy to destroy. The essence of trust building is to emphasize the similarities between you and the customer.”
— Thomas J. Watson | Former chairman and CEO of IBM
68. “One of the best ways to get authentic feedback from customers does not involve fancy math or a psychology degree. If you spend more time than a quick survey, and get to a deeper level of communication, then you can get more perspective on why a customer does what they do and what they really want. In-depth interviews can reveal a lot about what a person really thinks.”
— Colin Shaw | Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy
69. “The fundamental way to be customer-centric is to listen to customers consistently. Then use that feedback to do incredible things within the organization.”
70. “Customer effort, one of the biggest predictors of loyalty after a service interaction, is formed by one-third of what the customer needs to do and two-thirds of how it feels to them.”
— Rick DeLisi | Co-author of the “The Effortless Experience”
71. “Customers expect information on a timely basis. Even when there are no updates to share, great CX means picking up the phone and explaining that you have not forgotten and that you are still working on a resolution. Silence is never an option, especially for high-paying customers.”
72. “Empathy is one of those traits that lets customers know that you truly value them; that they are more than dollar signs to you. You’re not there just to make a sale. You’re there to ensure they enjoy the process and are taken care of.”
Not every interaction with a client is a positive one, but there are still lessons to be learned. Use these funny customer service quotes to boost your team’s morale and keep them smiling.
73. “The mindset that the way you’ve always done things is still working, prevents you from opportunities to learn and grow from feedback given to you by your customers.”
— Adele Gutman Milne | Host of the Hospitality Reputation Marketing Podcast: Get Great Reviews
74. “How would your company act if every customer were your mom?”
— Jeanne Bliss | Founder and CEO of Customer Bliss
75. “The ‘Your payment has been processed’ communication is not exactly how your mother taught you to write a thank-you note.”
— Jeannie Walters | CEO of Experience Investigators, and Customer Experience Speaker, Trainer, and Consultant
76. “The customer is not always right, but they are always the customer!”
— Shep Hyken | Chief Amazement Officer and speaker with Shepard Presentations LLC
77. “Saying hello doesn’t have an ROI. It’s about building relationships.”
78. “Customers, like spouses, can be at your beck and call if you give them what they need, when they need it and how they need it. Massage their ego and you have them by the heart.”
— J.N. Halm | Author of “Customer Romance: A New Feel of Customer Service”
79. “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”
Quotes about the importance of good customer service
A poor customer service experience is all that it takes to turn a customer away from your company forever. Consider these quotes from industry pros on the importance of making every interaction a positive one.
80. “If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell six friends. If you make customers unhappy on the internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends.”
— Jeff Bezos | Founder and executive chairman of Amazon
81. “Good customer service costs less than bad customer service.”
— Sally Gronow | Head Of Customer Service at Dŵr Cymru Welsh Water
82. “When a customer complains, he is doing you a special favor; he is giving you another chance to serve him to his satisfaction. You will appreciate the importance of this opportunity when you consider that the customer’s alternative option was to desert you for a competitor.”
— Seymour Fine | Author of “The Marketing Of Ideas And Social Issues”
83. “A brand not responding on Twitter is like hanging up the phone on customers. With millions watching.”
84. “Whether it’s a bored demeanor, a dismissive look, or just plain rude behavior, sloppy customer service spells disaster faster than just about any other business transgression.”
— Lauren Simonds | Managing editor of Small Business Computing
85. “Any customer that walks away, disrespected and defeated, represents tens of thousands of dollars out the door, in addition to the failure of a promise the brand made in the first place. You can’t see it but it’s happening daily.”
— Seth Godin | Entrepreneur, best-selling author, and speaker
86. “You can’t pour enough business into the top of the funnel to sustain real growth if customers are leaking out the bottom at a high rate.”
Quotes about leading with values in customer service
As you develop your own customer service philosophy, it can be easy to lose sight of the most crucial element: that the customer is paramount to the success of your company and the growth. Keep these customer philosophy quotes in mind as you and your employees interact with customers on a daily basis.
87. “When you assume negative intent, you’re angry. If you take away that anger and assume positive intent, you will be amazed.”
— Indra Nooyi | Former chairperson and CEO of PepsiCo
88. “The most convenient brands are able to anticipate an issue that they’re already ready to solve.”
89. “Both EI and IQ are important. The best customer service representatives balance product and systems knowledge with instinctive, human-centered capabilities that help them deliver extraordinary service — core to giving customers a positive brand experience.”
— Monika Jo | Former Director Of Communications at Mursion
90. “Imagine what you would like customers to say about you and then strive to be that business that gets those kinds of reviews. Start with the end in mind.”
— Adele Gutman Milne | Host of the Hospitality Reputation Marketing Podcast: Get Great Reviews
91. “To create customer happiness, it is equally as important to create employee happiness.”
— Ian Golding | CEO and founder of Customer Experience Consultancy Ltd.
92. “We’re not here just to provide an answer. We want people to connect with us as people, with our brand, and what we’re doing.”
— Stacy Justino | Director of Customer Happiness at Wisteria
93. “The future of communicating with customers rests in engaging with them through every possible channel: phone, e-mail, chat, Web, and social networks. Customers are discussing a company’s products and brand in real time. Companies need to join the conversation.”
95. “Service, in short, is not what you do, but who you are. It is a way of living that you need to bring to everything you do, if you are to bring it to your customer interactions.”
— Betsy Sanders | Principal at The Sanders Partnership
96. “Building a good customer experience does not happen by accident. It happens by design.”
97. “Customer service is not a department. It’s a philosophy to be embraced by every member of an organization, from the CEO to the most recently hired.”
— Shep Hyken | Chief Amazement Officer and speaker with Shepard Presentations LLC
98. “It shouldn’t matter how or where the customer seeks their service resolution. You should be able to rise to the challenge and meet them anywhere they want.”
— Jeff Nicholson | Global Head CRM Product Marketing of Pegasystems
99. “Consumers are statistics. Customers are people.”
— Stanley Marcus | Former president and chairman of Neiman Marcus
100. “Customer service is just a day-in, day-out, ongoing, never-ending, unremitting, persevering, compassionate type of activity.”
— Leon Gorman | Former president and chairman of L.L.Bean
101. “The most important thing you can do is make the distinction between customer service and guest hospitality. You need both things to thrive, but they are completely different.”
102. “Like the perfect score to a film, a good user experience is unobtrusive and transparent to the consumer because ‘it just works.’”
— Jeff Olson | Vice President of Customer Experience at PaySimple
103. “If you look at feedback as a gift, you will realize that these are customers that are trying to help you. In fact, they want you to help them. And so it’s mutually beneficial. You help them, they help you by exposing an issue that you then can fix. Not only for them, but for any other customer that might be having the same problem.”
— Dan Gingiss | Customer experience speaker and author
104. “Research shows that the factor most directly linked to creating a positive customer experience is actually our own employees. The fastest way to get customers to love your brand is to get employees to love their jobs.”
— Tiffani Bova | Global Customer Growth and Innovation Evangelist at Salesforce
Quotes to encourage great customer interactions
Happy customers are the key to a great customer service reputation. Inspire your employees to make the best of every interaction by sharing these motivational customer service quotes.
105. “There can be no improvements if you have the silver-bullet solution mindset. There is no substitute for making the small, incremental steps to improve things over the long haul. If you are looking for a simple, easy, quick solution, you won’t find it.”
— Colin Shaw | Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy
106. “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”
110. “A good design shows respect for your customer and you’re either respectful of their time or respectful of what it is that they desire, and so it makes it a very fundamental element to everything that you do.”
111. “If you make a sale, you can make a living. If you make an investment of time and good service in a customer, you can make a fortune.”
— Jim Rohn | Entrepreneur, author, and motivational speaker
112. “You do not get recommendations if your customers do not trust you. Make your business worthy of recommendations.”
— Ali Rayl | Vice President of Customer Experience at Slack
113. “Reaching out to customers is the best way to be proactive instead of reactive. Recommend products that might help them. Ask them about their pain points. Gather feedback on previous transactions and make improvements based on their needs. You can also engage in social listening, checking in on what customers say about your brand online and responding accordingly.”
114. “When a brand connects with their customer, that in some ways is the easy part, the hard part is keeping the customer at the center after the success/profits comes flooding in. Success can breed complacency, success can breed arrogance.”
— Anna Farmery | Co-founder of Care Quality Professionals and author of Focus on Customer Experience Delivers Profit
115. “Customers don’t always notice when you change something. It is not that they do not care; it is that they have other things going on in their lives. You must alert customers to changes, explain it was because of their feedback, and describe how the new process improves the situation.”
— Colin Shaw | Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy
Customer service quotes from famous figures
When it comes to sharing words of wisdom from experts in the customer service field, we would be remiss not to include quotes from the industry’s movers and shakers. From Sam Walton and Jeff Bezos to Walt Disney and Steve Jobs, these industry goliaths certainly know a thing or two about excellent customer service.
116. “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
— Maya Angelou | American poet, memoirist, and civil rights activist
117. “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology, not the other way around.”
— Steve Jobs | Co-founder and former chairman and CEO of Apple Inc.
118. “It is not the employer who pays the wages. Employers only handle the money… It is the customer who pays the wages”
119. “It is so much easier to be nice, to be respectful, to put yourself in your customer’s shoes and try to understand how you might help them before they ask for help, than it is to try to mend a broken customer relationship.”
120. “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.”
— Mahatma Gandhi | Lawyer, anti-colonialist, and political ethicist
121. “The achievements of an organization are the results of the combined effort of every individual.”
— Vince Lombardi | Former head coach and general manager of the Green Bay Packers
We hope these quotes will serve to inspire and motivate your team to create an experience that customers rave about.
You can help achieve that by ensuring your team has the proper tools to connect seamlessly with customers to quickly and effectively resolve any question or issue they might have.
Nextiva offers a wide variety of service tools to turbocharge your service team’s efficiency and gain instant customer insights to nurture relationships and create happy, lasting customers.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Blair Williamson
Blair Williamson was a Content Marketing Manager at Nextiva. Her background is marketing in higher education and tech. She geeks out on WordPress, kettlebells, and whatever book she's currently reading.
ISDN or Integrated Services Digital Network, is a circuit-switched telephone network system that transmits both data and voice over a digital line. You can also think of it as a set of communication standards to transmit data, voice, and signaling. These digital lines could be copper lines. It was designed to move outdated landline technology to digital. ISDN connections have a reputation for providing better speeds and higher quality than traditional connections. Faster speeds and better connections allow data transmissions to travel more reliably. The modern upgrade to an ISDN would be using a SIP trunk provider — they use the data for business phone service to a PBX. What We’ll Cover:
ISDN was born out of necessity. Analog phone networks failed constantly and proved to be unreliable for long-distance connections. Sometime in the 1960s, the system began to change over to a packet-based, digital switching system. The UN-based International Telecommunications Union, or ITU, started recommending ISDN in 1988 as a new system for operating companies to deliver data. It still took time for communication providers to begin to offer ISDN. This was mainly because both major companies at the time were on separate operating systems. By the 1990s, the National ISDN 1 (labeled N1-2 for short) was created. While this innovation could improve the quality of communications, an agreed-upon standard still took time to figure out. Finally, manufacturers like Motorola and USRobotics decided to make the transition easier for everyone. ISDN then launched across the US. It provided consumers with better pricing and higher-bandwidth internet access. Today, ISDN has been replaced by broadband internet access connections like DSL, WAN, and cable modems. It is still used as a backup when the main lines fail.
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It’s easy enough to define ISDN, but do you know how it works? Most people use ISDN for high-speed internet when options like DSL or cable modem connections are not available. Setting up ISDN is something you’ll want to work on with your Internet Service Provider (ISP). A lot of the steps can easily be done from your home. Your ISDN will be plugged in through a traditional POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) line that can access both phone numbers at once. You’ll have to make sure you have a working POTS line and assigned phone numbers to begin. After that, you can follow the steps below to get your voice and data communications up and running.
ISDN setup
Setting up an ISDN connection involves using a serial port and plugging in the telephone company line. The process of setting up ISDN involves:
Loading the modem driver disk and programming the modem
Pointing the modem toward the right phone numbers
Setting your connection speeds for each line
Directing your modem to dial your ISP (Internet Service Provider) — this phone number should be provided by your ISP
If necessary, set your modem for BONDING (the ability to access higher speeds by allowing your modem to dial both phone numbers at once)
What is the difference between ISDN and DSL?
There are a few key differences between ISDN and DSL. For starters, DSL transmits data far faster than an ISDN line can.
That’s because ISDN is a dial-up service that goes through a singular line. DSL connections never need to dial. They are sometimes called “always-on connections.”
Because of that, DSL sends its packets at speeds up to 100 Mbps, while ISDN tops out around 128 Kbps.
While both of these provide the same service, they do so in radically different ways.
What are the types of ISDNs?
There are two types of ISDN networks — BRI (Basic Rate Interface) and PRI (Primary Rate Interface). The major difference between BRI and PRI is the level of service and reliability. To sum them up:
BRI is the lower tier of service. It only provides basic needs at a lower cost.
PRI is the main service. It provides a better connection, more reliable service, and faster speeds.
Both PRI and BRI ISDN use B channels for sending data and D channels for other forms of communication. The difference lies in the number of channels they use to accomplish this.
For instance, BRI uses only two B channels and one D channel. It has a maximum speed of 128 kbps.
PRI varies in the number of channels it uses given its location. It can be adjusted for speeds up to 2.94 Mbps.
In the US, PRI tends to use 23 B channels and one D channel. The amount can be doubled for faster speeds and provide a backup D line for emergencies.
Speed: BRI vs. PRI
ISDN comes with a set speed for each option.
BRI provides 128 Kbps over a standard copper wire, broken down into 64 Kbps over the B channel and 16 Kbps over the D channel.
Using a PRI can potentially double those speeds. The two competing standards make use of both B channels to access the 128 Kbps throughput and include:
BONDING (Bandwidth On Demand Interoperability Group) — a set of ISDN protocols that allow users to use more than one ISDN B channel. This is also known as multilink, channel aggregation, or load balancing
Multilink PPP — a method for splitting, recombining, and sequencing data across multiple links. This is not specific to ISDN and can be applied to other technologies
PRI is a T1 circuit that supports 23 B channels at 64 Kbps and 1 D channel at 64 Kbps.
This gives users the ability to combine B channels to form a larger network.
What are the advantages of ISDN?
So why do people use ISDN?
It first started as an alternative to your dial-up connection that provided higher internet speeds.
To access the internet with ISDN, users had to connect through a digital modem.
People still use ISDN for internet access in areas where broadband internet isn’t an option. For the most part, ISDN for internet access is being phased out.
There have been many attempts to improve the ISDN service.
Broadband ISDN, also known as B-ISDN, transmitted data over fiber optic cable. Another attempt was ISDN BRI which attempted to improve voice services. Some of the reasons people choose ISDN are:
It offers multiple digital services that operate through the same copper wire
Digital signals broadcast through telephone lines.
ISDN provides a higher data transfer rate.
Can connect devices and allow them to operate over a single line. This includes credit card readers, fax machines, and other manifold devices.
It is up and running faster than other modems.
The cost of ISDN is much higher than some traditional broadband options. This forced people to search for alternatives. One popular alternative is VoIP.
Get the reliability and scalability your team needs with Nextiva.
Redundant data centers across the U.S. Multi-peer gigabit networks. Exceptional reliability. Easy to manage.
VoIP (aka Voice over Internet Protocol), takes audio signals and turns them into digital transmission data. That data can be sent from point-to-point through the internet. VoIP is taking the place of traditional telephone system lines. It lets users make phone calls over the internet without needing a physical telephone line.
There are several ways users can access the benefits of VoIP. Some examples include ATA (analog telephone terminal adapter), IP Phones, and computer-to-computer connections. While SIP trunking is similar to cloud phone service, it lacks advanced phone features that many now expect. But it’s still worth considering.
A Comparison of ISDN Service and VoIP
Comparison
ISDN
VoIP
Reliability
Difficult to set up and easy for the system to fail.
Takes seconds to set up, low call failures, and can be used as both a primary or secondary solution
Form
Requires external, physical circuit to be installed
Plug into existing internet connection with no external sources needed
Flexibility
Tied to a contract/geographical area code and changes can take several weeks to implement
Make changes instantaneously, and is not tied to a geographical location
Cost
Expensive to implement and costly to make calls with bearer channels
Low install costs and between 40-90% cheaper to make calls
Futureproofing
Outdated with a confirmed end-of-life timescale
Easily customizable, scalable, and cost-effective
The Benefits of VoIP
It’s clear that the VoIP benefits outweigh ISDN. The flexibility and cost-effectiveness alone make it with a second glance.
The above table does a great job of outlining the differences between the two. It shows the weaknesses of an older offering, like ISDN. When you go beyond the promise of a lower cost and flexibility, it’s obvious that VoIP offers a whole lot more.
1) Cost
For businesses, few options compare to the savings of VoIP.
One huge story of cost saving came from Dell, who used a mobile VoIP workforce and saved a reported $39.5 million.
A landline phone system could cost an average of $50 per line. That includes only local and domestic calls.
A VoIP line can save as much as 60% and comes with a host of other offerings that landlines didn’t have.
2) Accessibility
You can take your VoIP anywhere as long as you have internet access. It’s like your email account, where you sign in with your ID and uses the network connection as your phone line. VoIP gives employees far more options than were ever offered with traditional analog phones in the form of virtual phone systems.
Unified messaging is a major bonus for VoIP users. This is a feature that allows remote employees to tap into their business phones through mobile applications.
3) Scalability
Need to add a line? VoIP makes that easier than ever.
This is thanks in large part to the fact that you no longer need to have a physical landline installed.
Installing a new VoIP line is basically like getting a new username assigned to you. It can be attached to any device, at any time, and is ready for use in just a few minutes.
The ability to add a new employee line at the click of a button allows businesses to expand without incurring unexpected costs.
4) Control
With VoIP, you control a lot more than you could with traditional landlines.
Most of us won’t even pick-up the phone for an out of area phone number. VoIP lets businesses assign a local phone number to appeal to their specific market.
VoIP also allows large and small businesses the added benefit of auto-attendant. This gives consumers the perception that the business is bigger than it is.
It leaves the customer feeling like they’re contacting a well organized and professional organization.
5) Voice Quality
As long as there is a reliable internet connection, users should experience sound quality that is just as good, if not better, than traditional landlines. Need proof? Just look at Nextiva’s uptime and performance over the last 90 days:
The only issues with VoIP quality are when you run into internet connection issues. Bad bandwidth will equal a bad connection. That means VoIP may not work as well in rural areas that have limited internet connectivity.
6) More Features
The reason so many businesses are switching to VoIP is because of its features.
To save costs, businesses can add:
VoIP allows users to transmit data over the line even while they’re in the middle of a call.
One of the most sought-after features for businesses is video conferencing. It’s easier than ever to get the entire office on a call. That’s even true for traveling and remote employees, thanks to the VoIP video feature.
It’s one of the biggest cost-savers that VoIP offers.
In Conclusion
It’s clear that VoIP is changing the way people experience business communications. And more than that, it’s giving businesses more flexibility than they’ve ever had before. By adding users through an online portal, connecting cell phones to business lines, and allowing for seamless team collaboration, VoIP checks all the boxes. VoIP reduces the upfront and monthly costs businesses once had to shell out to have traditional phone lines. The antiqued options, like ISDN, no longer give users what they need. Unified communications is the way of the future, so it’s no surprise that VoIP is taking off like a rocket. Are you ready to add it to your business?
Get the reliability and scalability your team needs with Nextiva.
Redundant data centers across the U.S. Multi-peer gigabit networks. Exceptional reliability. Easy to manage.
Gaetano DiNardi led demand generation at Nextiva and has a track record of success working with brands like Major League Baseball, Pipedrive, Sales Hacker, and Outreach.io. Outside of marketing, Gaetano is an accomplished music producer and songwriter. He’s worked with major artists like Fat Joe, Shaggy, and loves making music to stay turbocharged.
Net Promoter Score, often shortened to NPS, is a calculation used to determine how likely customers are to recommend your service. Net Promoter Score ranges from -100 to +100 and is often called the ‘gold standard customer experience metric.’
Businesses use NPS to measure how well their company, product, or service is performing throughout the course of different time periods.
A better or worse NPS than the previous period shows whether a business is more or less likely to receive a referral from a customer.
To calculate NPS, businesses use a survey approach to gain responses to a single question. You can opt to ask extra questions to find out why customers score you a certain way and what you could do to improve.
The core NPS question is:
How likely are you to recommend our company to a friend or colleague?
Respondents can score from 0 to 10.
0 means “not at all likely” and 10 means “extremely likely”.
Taking the results from the main question, you total the number of responses, apply the NPS formula, and arrive at a final score.
It’s this simple, single-question approach that businesses love about NPS.
Goran Luledzija, CEO of Localizely, says that feedback is important but so is not taking up too much customer time.
“NPS is so helpful for us because customers can fill it in quickly. There is a higher chance of completion as it is so simple. If they want to leave more detailed feedback, they can. If not, we have an NPS in seconds.”
What is the Net Promoter Score formula?
To calculate your Net Promoter Score, you must tally up all your responses then subtract the percentage of “detractors” from the “promoters”.
A detractor is someone who responds with a score of 0-6.
A promoter is someone who responds with a score of 9 or 10.
You can classify people who respond with 7 or 8 as “passive”. These are neither detractors or promoters and their scores don’t provide any weight to the overall score.
For example, if 50% of respondents score your business a 9 or 10 and 20% score between 0 and 6, you must subtract 20 from 50.
50 – 20 = 30
In this case, your NPS is 30.
But is that a good NPS?
What is a good Net Promoter Score?
We can split NPS into Bad, Good, Favorable, Excellent, and World Class. These are the categories that Bain & Co, the consulting firm credited with introducing NPS, has set.
Good: Anything over 0 is classified as good. A positive number reflects a positive customer sentiment.
Favorable: Anything over 20 is classified as favorable.
Excellent: Anything over 50 is classified as excellent.
World Class: Anything over 80 is classified as world class. This shows that you are in an elite tier of customer service providers, which few companies obtain.
While these are good indicators of general customer experience, there are variables like technology, industry, and geography in play.
The table below shows the dramatic range between the healthcare and telecommunications sector. Use these NPS scores for benchmarking your customer service operation.
While reasons for NPS aren’t always collected or publicized, it’s easy to see why there is such a gap.
When receiving healthcare services, people are happy to be made healthier again. Whereas, telecommunication providers often send an NPS survey after a customer experiences an outage or fault.
Even if the particular interaction is positive, there was a problem that caused the interaction in the first place.
Since people score NPS, we must also factor in moods and motivation. If customers get offered an incentive to complete an NPS survey, they are more likely to provide a positive score.
For an accurate score, remain neutral and ask for an honest opinion.
What is a bad NPS score?
Bain & Co classifies any NPS under 0 as Bad. Both in terms of score and reflection on your company.
A score below 0 shows a clear gap for improvement. Businesses must act to improve their customer experience to remain successful.
In some cases, a single improvement can trigger a better NPS.
For example, if your service goes down twice a week, fixing the uptime will make your customers happier. If everyone changes their score, your NPS shoots up considerably.
What is the highest and lowest possible NPS?
The highest possible NPS is 100. The lowest possible NPS is -100.
If every single customer scores you 9/10 or 10/10, they are all promoters. This shows 100% of your customers are happy to recommend you.
If every single customer scores you between 0 and 6, they are all detractors. This shows the likelihood of referral is low.
While 6/10 reflects an above-average score in other walks of life, only just above average doesn’t mean customers will refer you. As humans, we must be impressed (not just satisfied) to refer our friends or colleagues.
It’s the companies who understand this that succeed with NPS and customer experience.
Why is Net Promoter Score important?
There is no metric more important than what your customers think about you.
Sure, sales figures are important for getting customers through the door.
But customer retention means every new customer is a bonus. It’s not a virtuous circle where a new customer comes in but you lose an old one.
How does NPS affect a company?
When you have a great NPS score, it’s something to shout about.
You can use it as social proof when it comes to marketing your business.
If customers are literally saying “I’m extremely likely to recommend your company”, it’s a positive sign for potential customers.
If, however, you have a bad NPS, you lack the social proof and are constantly fighting for customer retention rather than growing your business through new sales.
When you survey NPS, it gives you the insight to improve your customer’s experience and increase the chance of them referring a friend or colleague.
In publicly traded companies, a good or bad NPS can impact stock price. Likewise, when a company gets purchased, NPS may play a factor in the sale price.
Is there a disadvantage to using NPS?
The slight downside to using NPS is that customers often only recall their latest interaction with a business.
For example, Amna might call technical support three times a year and have two great experiences. But, if the third call ends in a negative experience, Amna is likely to suggest she will refer the company to a friend or colleague.
You can do little to combat this potential problem.
The best advice is to focus on providing a consistent customer experience and the positives will outweigh the negatives.
What companies have the best NPS?
Below are some examples of companies with the highest reported Net Promoter Scores.
Note that some companies choose not to make their NPS public. Some of these scores are estimates based on analysis and interpretation.
According to Customer Gauge, Tesla has an NPS of 97.
This is a reflection of both the automotive industry (average 58) and Tesla’s exceptional customer experience.
Experts put Tesla’s high NPS down to six key criteria:
Excellent product.
Transparency.
Responding to customer feedback.
Clear CEO communications.
Personalized buying experience.
A clear vision.
If you’re reviewing your NPS, it’s worth writing these on a sticky note to remind you of how Tesla succeeds.
It’s not just huge, billion-dollar companies that can achieve high NPS.
Shaunak Amin, CEO of SnackMagic, is proud of their company’s NPS of 90.
“This gold standard metric helps us better understand customer perception so we can gauge their loyalty. With this information, we can identify groups of clients with the potential for significant long-term gains. Then we develop custom strategies for each client to ensure their continued satisfaction which will keep them referring more business our way.”
Hartman Income REIT, a commercial real estate firm in Texas, reports an NPS of 69.3, putting it 30% higher than its industry average.
Sarah Hoopes, Head of PR, says: “To us, NPS is how we regulate our level of customer service. Our head of property management explains it as a temperature gauge. It tells us how we are doing and how others perceive us. It’s one of the main ways we have kept our standards high and have been able to provide our white glove service to our tenants for over 38 years.”
Other high scorers include Costco (79), Starbucks (77), and USAA (75).
What companies have the worst NPS?
At the other end of the Spectrum, suggestion is that Amazon’s NPS has been -26 and -11 in recent years.
But, to demonstrate the fluctuation and the power of change, Amazon’s most recently reported NPS is 62.
Amazon has always shouted about its customer loyalty. But there is suggestion that loyalty doesn’t always reflect the likelihood to refer.
According to Customer Guru, Viacom’s NPS is -23 and Facebook’s is -21.
These three companies make up some of the 250 largest companies in the world. A clear reflection that there is no correlation between company size and NPS.
How to improve your NPS
You can improve your NPS by applying the three Ts.
These are training, tools, and tactics.
1. Training
Continuous training and excellent customer service go hand-in-hand.
It’s one thing getting a new agent up to speed on customer service best practices when they start, but what happens over time?
Agents pick up bad habits, learn to shortcut important steps, and become demotivated when customers have a bad experience.
Support your agents by providing learning materials, refresher sessions, and introducing gamification techniques to keep morale high.
Happy employees lead to happy customers and a higher NPS.
As your product or service evolves, don’t forget to invest in training your support agents on how it works and the nuances it faces.
Empowering agents to serve every customer reduces the chances of needing to transfer a call or live chat.
2. Tools
When it’s impossible to cross-skill agents completely, there are many contact center features that ensure customers get to the right agent first time.
For example, skills-based routing allows callers to select the reason they are calling and get transferred to an agent with the appropriate experience.
So when a customer selects option 2 for help with their broadband, you know the agent handling the call has experience with broadband.
There are no more long hold times or transfers between agents.
Another tool option is implementing a call back option during long wait times. This is the super helpful feature that lets callers select “please call me back” instead of waiting for an extended period of time.
How does this impact NPS? This type of feature improves your first call resolution, and inturn, your NPS. After all, nobody wants to be bumped from department to department and have to explain their problem over and over again. Likewise, nobody wants to wait in a queue while their problem gets worse and worse. Tools that decrease their wait time can certainly impact the NPS.
Dominic Kent is a content marketer specializing in unified communications and contact centers. After 10 years of managing installations, he founded UC Marketing to bridge the gap between service providers and customers. He spends half of his time building content marketing programs and the rest writing on the beach with his dogs.
Wireless routers have become a staple in today’s society. They are in businesses, home offices and anywhere else you find wireless internet. With a wide variety of devices on the market, choosing the best VoIP router can feel daunting. When it comes to VoIP (Voice over IP), you will need a router that is fast and compatible with your hardware. As you review our VoIP router buying guide, ask yourself what you’re really looking for:
Is it faster internet speed or network protection?
Maybe you’re a power user or it’s time to trade up from a single-band router to a tri-band device?
We’ve combed through the vast number of routers online and compiled the 10 best VoIP routers to buy in 2023. Along with our choices, we’ll cover what each router excels at and its best uses.
Of course, our list is not exhaustive. However, these are recommendations based off customer feedback. As always, it’s essential that you carefully pick the router suited for your needs.
1) Sonicwall TZ Series – Best for its QoS capabilities
The SonicWall TZ series offers a perfect security solution for SMBs. It combines software-defined wide area networking technology and high-speed threat prevention. The TZ Series offers an extensive range of wireless features and networking. Its centralized management provides an easy to work security solution. Centralized analytics, licensing, management and reporting are available through accessing a security center. Its sleek design adds to its appeal.
Integrated security solution
SD-WAN networking
Centralized analytics and reporting
2) NetGear Nighthawk X10 Router – Best for Speed
If you want fast Internet, the NetGear Nighthawk X10 is the router for you. For media streaming, the X10 remains the industry’s fastest router. It continues delivering 802.11ac/ad Wi-Fi for instant downloads and 4K streaming. The Nighthawk hardware offers exceptional wireless performance. This helps users enjoy wireless speeds up to 7.2 Gbps. Additionally, the Nighthawk X10 has four external antennas to boost Wifi signals.
Most computer users or enthusiasts know of the gaming company Asus. They have top-of-the-line gaming hardware and various high-end VoIP routers. The RT-AC88U is one of those AC3100 routers that comes with 8 Gigabit LAN ports. The router’s WiFi performance for the 2.4 gigahertz and the five gigahertz bands remains fast. This makes it the perfect router to experience reliable, clear calls and videos. This VoIP router is also good for its quality of service, but we saw mixed results with specific versions. With that said, Asus has designed the web interface that is intuitive and easy to use.
8 Gigabit LAN ports
Exceptional WiFi performance
Intuitive web interface
4) NetGear ProSafe – Best for Business-Class Network Protection
NetGear ProSafe business-class VPN firewalls are high performing routers. They deliver five types of protection for your business. They also provide fully secure network access between locations. This makes them ideal for organizations that may be handling sensitive information. Models with many WAN ports can operate in a failover configuration or load-balancing. The load-balancing configuration enables the router to distribute traffic across two broadband connections. It is also possible to use different internet service providers.
5) Linksys EA8300 Max Stream – Best for Power Users
The Linksys EA8300 Max Stream is an active tri-band router. It offers multiple ways to customize its features for the best performance. You can use it to track network use and share wireless signal between devices. It can also prioritize data allotment between media and other applications. The router can be managed manually and automatically. At home or on-the-go usage is possible and why the Linksys EA8300 Max Stream is great for a power user.
6) Cisco 900 Series – Best for Small and Midsize Business
This router series is ideal for home offices, small businesses and enterprise branches. These routers deliver threat protection and integrated security. They are perfect for network defense and prevent vulnerabilities and attacks.
Additionally, the security suite includes SLA monitoring, verification and configuration management. It also comes with a four-port managed switch.
Integrated security features
Metro Ethernet connectivity
Streamlined deployment of WAN services
7) Sophos UTM – Best for Minimizing IT Security Risks
Sophos UTM supplies the ultimate network security package in a single modular appliance. Its intuitive interface can rapidly create policies to help control security risks. The interface includes bright, detailed reports to help you understand its policies. With the Sophos UTM, you’ll have a consolidated network security platform. You are protecting your network using multi-layered protection technologies. That protection includes Advanced Threat Protection and web filtering. Best of all, you can choose the level of protection with modular subscriptions.
Multi-layered protection technologies
Intuitive security interface
Detailed reports for security improvement
8) ZyXEL ZyWall – Best for Faster VPN and Firewall Performance
Business operations today are more mobile, more global, and more dynamic than ever. To meet this demand, ZyXEL has introduced all-new VPN Firewalls. These Firewalls are business-grade. The new ZyWALL Series VPN Firewalls have multi-core CPUs. Thus, they boast the fastest VPN and firewall performance on the market. These routers come guaranteed with up to 6 Gbps firewall and 800 Mbps VPN throughput.
ZyWALL Series VPN Firewalls
Fast VPN and firewall speeds
High-speed networking performance
9) WatchGuard Firebox T35 – Best Call Quality
WatchGuard Firebox T35 matches today’s lightning-fast internet connections. It’s designed for enterprise-level security but intended for small and midsize companies.
Its super-fast connection compatibility allows the VoIP router to offer expert-level security. This while still offering very clear calls and videos. The central interface allows you real-time visibility into a network’s security events.
Additionally, its management tools give users complete access to an intuitive console. The router includes five ethernets and one PoE+ port to power any other devices you may need plugged in.
Enterprise-level security
Super-fast connection compatibility
Versatile management tools
10) FortiGate 52E SMB Firewall – Best for Enterprise Branch Security
The FortiGate 52E uses continuous threat intelligence to shield against malicious websites. The router can detect unknown attacks using dynamic analysis. It also provides automated mitigation to stop targeted attacks.
The router also offers high-level networking capabilities. This allows it to merge networking and security functionality. It also enables flexible deployment such as UTM and Secure SD-WAN.
A predefined security checklist allows it to improve security. This makes it the ultimate router for enterprise security.
Continuous thread intelligence
Ability to detect unknown attacks using dynamic analysis
Automated mitigation to stop cyberattacks
Different Types of Routers
There are three types of routers: single-band, dual-band and tri-band.
Once the network cable gets plugged into a router, it transmits an internet signal to devices. That radio wave signal will travel across one of two frequency bands: 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz. Those frequencies differentiate a single-band router from a dual-band and tri-band router.
Single-Band Routers
Dual-Band Routers
Tri-Band Routers
Single-Band Routers
A single-band router operates on one frequency band—the 2.4 GHz frequency. Older, single-band routers operate on the 2003 – 802.11g standard which caps data speeds at 54 Mbps. Most iPhone 3G and 3GSs smartphones operated under that standard. Some single-band routers operate on the 802.11n standard aka “Wireless-N.” Those routers are running on a 2.4 GHz band which only offers speeds up to 800 Mbps. But, most will not see these speeds daily due to internet service limitations.
Dual-Band Routers
Dual-Band routers will support the 2.4 GHz Wireless-N standard and the 5 GHz, frequency band. With 5GHz connectivity, you have a stable and faster connection. This is beneficial if you live in a large apartment complex or densely populated city. This also makes dual-band routers better equipped for enterprise use than single-band. Some dual-band routers have features older models won’t. For instance, most dual-band support MU-MIMO technology. That feature improves how Wi-Fi interacts with various devices. Routers without MU-MIMO can only interchange with a single device at a time.
Tri-Band Routers
Tri-Band routers have the capability of multiple Gigabit speeds. On the 5 GHz band, they are capable of upwards of 4,000 Gbps. The Tri-Band refers to their unique features: one 2.4 GHz band plus two 5 GHz bands. When using automated features, tri-band routers direct devices over to the 5 GHz band. Since they have 5 GHz of data, tri-band routers reduce signal interference significantly more than dual-band devices. That makes tri-band routers more efficient for environments with various connected 5 GHz devices.
Mesh Networks
A network of interlocked routers (called points or nodes) is called a mesh network. The nodes operate together to supply internet coverage over a vast area. A mesh network consists of various routers, each providing coverage, but remains a single network communicating with nodes nearby. A mesh network will deliver internet access anywhere the nodes can reach, like through a three-story house, an office building, or even across several city blocks. Having a mesh network means the coverage exceeds what a single router can provide.
5 Router Features to Look For
Buying a wireless router that is easy to configure and delivers stable WiFi may be challenging. Especially when it’s your first time purchasing the device. When you search online, you’ll discover there are hundreds of routers to choose from. To make matters worse, some manufacturers and distributors prefer to describe their equipment using technical terms or acronyms. Many users can find this confusing.
To help you decide, below are the five common router features to look for, their definitions and how each gets used.
Quality of Service
VLAN
Dual/Tri-Band Frequency
802.11ac and Mu-MIMO
H.323 and SIP Support
#1 Quality of Service
Quality of Service (QoS) measures or describes a service’s overall performance. QoS is also a feature of switches and routers. They prioritize traffic, allowing significant traffic to pass first, improving critical network traffic’s performance. QoS is useful with VoIP phones or in LANs with high local traffic volumes. It is particularly crucial for transporting traffic with special requirements. Quality of Service varies by switch.
#2 VLAN
VLANs (Virtual LANs) address issues such as network management, security and scalability. Network architects set up VLANs to provide network segmentation. Routers between VLANs filter broadcast traffic, mitigate network congestion, perform address summarization and enhance network security. Virtual LANs split broadcast domains in a Local Area Network (LAN) environment. When one VLAN must communicate with another VLAN, the traffic gets routed between them. That type of routing is called inter-VLAN routing. You can set up inter-VLAN routing on a smart switch by creating a Layer 3 interface known as a switch virtual interface (SVI).
#3 Dual/Tri-Band Frequency
A dual-band frequency operates on two bands: 2.4GHz and 5GHz. With Dual-Band support, speeds can go up to 450Mbps at 2.4GHz and 1300 Mbps at 5GHz. Tri-Band frequency operates on three bands: a 2.4 GHz band and two 5 GHz bands. Tri-band frequency reduces signal interference significantly more than dual-band devices. Its high bandwidth also results in the clearest calls and best VoIP service.
#4 802.11ac and Mu-MIMO
802.11ac is a wireless LAN technology that represents a significant performance increase. This technology provides the fastest wireless connectivity speeds. MU-MIMO stands for “multiuser-multiple input, multiple output” and is a brand-new feature. It supports environments where many users are trying to access a wireless network at the same time. The use of an MU-MIMO allows users to share a device without experiencing reduced speeds.
#5 H.323 and SIP Support
H.323 is a binary-based standard developed to support rich-media communications over IP networks. It initially focused on video conferencing but now includes audio and video conferencing. The Internet Engineering Task Force developed SIP. It sets up a session between two points and is a flexible component of internet architecture. Unlike H.323, SIP’s initial focus was voice communications, rather than video. However, it was expanded to include video, application sharing, presence, instant messaging and other common communications applications.
What is the best VoIP router today?
Some factors can change depending on firmware and hardware. Network architecture can also play a role. However, if we had to choose a “winner” from this list it would be the SonicWall TZ series. It works well and includes easy-to-setup configurations. Of course, everyone may have preferences of their own or choices based on their network layout and requirements.
If you need further research on the best VoIP routers on the market today, Prince Rich of Rich Technology Group discusses his top gigabyte routers along with some tips on what to look for when buying a router.
In order to offer the highest quality business communications and business VoIP quality, you will want a fast, reliable wireless router. If you are working with sensitive information you will also want to choose a router with reliable security features. One of the best VoIP routers from this list are sure to meet any special needs you have.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gaetano DiNardi
Gaetano DiNardi led demand generation at Nextiva and has a track record of success working with brands like Major League Baseball, Pipedrive, Sales Hacker, and Outreach.io. Outside of marketing, Gaetano is an accomplished music producer and songwriter. He’s worked with major artists like Fat Joe, Shaggy, and loves making music to stay turbocharged.
With Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), you can move your existing PBX phone system to the cloud. With SIP, Voice over Internet Protocol is possible. Here’s a wild guess: the success of your company depends on how well you can communicate. And not just with your customers, but also prospects, partners, vendors, and coworkers. If the systems that support your business communication aren’t reliable or up-to-date, you’ll struggle. Phone calls are a big one. If you’re dealing with inefficient phone systems or high expenses (or both), you’ll want to consider SIP trunk provider. You can run your voice calls, video calls, and instant messaging through an internet-based VoIP phone service provider. SIP calling will transform the quality of your business phone system while bringing the cost of it down. In this guide, we’re breaking down how SIP works and how you can make the most of it.
What is SIP Calling?
SIP calling, or Session Initiation Protocol calling, the process of transmitting voice calls over a SIP trunk or a SIP channel. It’s often interchanged with VoIP calls. However, SIP calling actually uses VoIP to move your analog call traffic over an internet connection.
The easiest way to know what this means is to visualize it.
A traditional phone system consists of these three parts:
PBX (Private Branch Exchange): your on-premises system that manages your calls
PRI (Primary Rate Interface) lines: lines that connect calls to the PSTN
PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network): the network that routes calls to their destination
PBX
PRI
PSTN
SIP calling removes the need for PRI lines. A SIP trunk, a phone line that uses the SIP protocol, is virtually installed over your internet connection. It then uses this internet connection to connect your PBX to the PSTN, bypassing the PRI lines.
The result? You can use call management features like auto attendants, call forwarding, voicemail, and much more without analog or multiple phone lines.
The Benefits of SIP Calling
By now, you know that SIP calling can help you move your company forward. Let’s unpack the main benefits of SIP calling and its impact on your business.
1) Cost-effective communication
Think about the amount on your current business phone bill. Now imagine paying up to 70% less than that. With SIP trunking, that’s exactly what you could achieve.
If you’re wondering why there’s such a difference in communication costs, here’s what SIP calling will do for you:
No service disruptions, so you won’t lose business
With SIP calling, you can remove any worries about the cost of your phone setup so you can focus on your customers.
2) Easy scalability
“Okay, the costs are down, but my company is growing. Will I end up paying as much as before SIP just because of that?” This is a legitimate question. You don’t want to change your entire phone system only to be back at square one when you hire more people or expand to new locations. When you use SIP trunking, everything from phone calls to video conferencing happens over the internet. That means you don’t need to buy more physical lines just because you need more phone numbers or concurrent calls. Your SIP provider will help you add more lines, and you can often even do it yourself. Easy.
3) Unified communications = flexibility and productivity
When we looked at the differences between PSTN, VoIP, and POTS, we discovered that companies that use unified communications save up to 115 minutes per day for each user. That’s nearly two hours!
It’s simple: a SIP phone system helps you create a unified virtual presence. Instead of consistent switching between communication channels, you can centralize and synchronize them.
As a result, you’ll see better collaboration, productivity, and efficiency. Whether you’re a single office with 10 people or have hundreds of employees across the world, everyone can be reachable through a device they already have—their smartphone. Related: What Is a SIP Phone & How Does It Work?
4) Reliable, high-quality calls
Physical landlines can fail you when you need them most. Power outages, system failures, or bad weather aren’t things you can plan for. Poor-quality phone calls, or no phone calls at all, aren’t an option. Luckily, SIP calling ensures a way to receive calls even in these unpredictable scenarios. This is possible thanks to redundancy, which automatically reroutes your calls to your other locations or employee mobile phones.
5) Excellent user experience
Finally, if you fear you’ll have to master new technologies and train your employees on them, you can relax.
You can manage everything about your SIP account from a simple interface. Your SIP provider will ensure you’re set up and good to go. You can use it to manage your entire business phone system, such as call routing, extensions, adding phone lines, and much more.
It’s a user-friendly way to gain full control over your company’s entire communication system.
Who Uses SIP Calling?
Companies with an existing on-premises PBX system, also known as an IP PBX, can take advantage of taking their PBX system to the cloud.
Larger companies may be more reserved towards switching to SIP calling. This can seem particularly challenging if they have thousands of employees in multiple countries or continents. It makes switching to SIP impossible without service disruption and a steep bill.
But the longer you delay the switch, the more costly it is to run your business communications in the long run.
SIP calling lets you:
Collaborate over video chat, messaging, conference calls, and more
Connect with anyone inside or outside your company instantly, regardless of their location or technical setup
Use your preferred device to make important calls by turning your laptop or tablet into a softphone
Integrate all of your communications channels
Whether you’re looking for a small business phone service or an enterprise-level, moving your telephone calls to the cloud will pay off.
Can I make SIP calls on iPhone and Android?
Yes, you can complete calls using your SIP trunking provider, but with a little extra configuration. Smartphone users can make SIP calls by using their phone’s settings, or more preferably, using a SIP dialing app. Apple provides developers tools to integrate their calling capabilities into the phone for a smooth and consistent appearance for iPhone users. This means that users looking to use their SIP provider need a third-party app to make calls from the phone. For Android users, Google provides users with built-in settings for registering your device with a SIP provider. They also provide ways for developers to create familiar calling interfaces that users enjoy.
Benefits of SIP calls:
They can receive calls on a single device to multiple numbers, such as personal and work number
Separate personal calls from business calls
Increased availability and performance in areas with limited coverage
High-definition call quality calls due to wideband audio codecs and higher bandwidth
Recommended: Download the Nextiva App from the App Store. If you use Nextiva, that’s all you need.
Download a SIP calling app from the App Store. Enter your username and password from your SIP provider. You may need to contact your VoIP provider for these credentials.
To enable SIP calls on your Android phone:
Recommended: Download the VoIP app from your VoIP provider like Nextiva.
If you don’t have Nextiva, you will need to configure your SIP Calling:
Open the Phone app and click the More (…) menu. Select Settings > Calls > Calling accounts > SIP accounts. Enter your username, password, and SIP server.
You may need to contact your VoIP provider for these credentials.
Once your VoIP service is configured, you can make SIP calls just like you normally do with your cellular provider.
This approach to SIP calling is only feasible on a small scale. If you need a reliable, scalable phone system, you’ll want to move your physical phone setup to the cloud.
No matter how you set up your SIP calls, it leverages Wi-Fi calling. Once you’re connected to a wireless network, you can make a call from your mobile phone using Wi-Fi instead of your cellular network.
What’s the Difference Between SIP and VoIP?
SIP and VoIP are different. As such, they can’t be pitted against each other. They’re not competing for customers to choose between them. Instead, SIP is one of the industry-standard methods of achieving VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol).
Here’s what you need to know about SIP and VoIP, and how they relate to each other.
Key elements of SIP:
Used to establish, modify and terminate multimedia sessions like VoIP calls
SIP requests are processed by a SIP proxy, which ensures messages are received in their original formats, such as voice calls, instant messages, and video calls
Sends packets that can include voice, data, or video
SIP phones can perform independently without a computer
SIP servers manage the registrations of SIP devices like VoIP desk phones
Key elements of VoIP:
Uses the internet or internal networks to make or receive calls
Not one technology, but utilizes a family of technologies
A VoIP provider organizes and relays phone calls and video sessions on its network
If you’re asking the question of SIP versus VoIP, it probably means you’re looking to take your communication channels online and unify them, so you’re searching for the best options for you.
That’s a great direction to take! Related: Should You Get a Cloud-Based Phone System? (Pros & Cons)
Get Your Company Ready For SIP Calling
As we’ve established, SIP calling is here to replace the role of outdated PRI technology that relies on analog lines. Staying old-school with your phone system is a costly decision. If you use a PBX today, you can provide your entire building voice service by using SIP Trunking. If it’s expensive to maintain all your equipment or you’re paying for excess call capacity, SIP is a great option to consider. Planning to expand offices or add multiple business locations? SIP scales to your needs! And if all you’re looking for is the reliability of a cloud phone system centralized in a simple interface, you’re definitely ready for SIP.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Julie Bai
Julie Bai was a product manager at Nextiva, UCaaS evangelist, no-bull communicator, and translator for people, dog lover, and mother to an adorably active boy.
Empathy is a customer service superpower. It’s so much easier to get on the same page with a customer if you actually understand, feel, and visualize the customer’s experience.
But here’s a question and concern: Can you actually train employees to have empathy?
Absolutely. Not only can you train for empathy, you can provide tools to employees that will help them convey empathy as well.
You just need to know how.
Try role-playing to experience how a customer might feel.
The way to train for empathy is to solve for the most common barriers that can block it.
Often, customer-facing employees have never experienced anything similar to the situation that’s facing their caller. If this is the case, what’s helpful is to give those employees a chance to walk in the shoes of your customers.
Case in point in healthcare call centers: the employees who answer the phones and provide scheduling may have no shared personal experience of what the person on the other end of the phone line (who is almost certainly apprehensive and very likely in pain) is up against.
These schedulers often work out of separate, nonclinical buildings, and are therefore unlikely to encounter even a single patient face to face.
How to solve this disconnect? The training solution I recommend is to simulate clinical moments using role-playing and video.
Another stumbling block is the challenge involved in recognizing that time may move differently for your customer than it does for us when we are providing customer service to that customer.
Again to use a healthcare example, a patient with a full bladder (and/or in any other kind of discomfort) is going to experience the wait time for relief from a nurse as being far longer than the nurse would naturally experience without developing an empathetic view of the difference in situation.
Training on this and role-playing can go a long way to help cue employees into the pacing of the customer, as well as considering that the situation may call for more urgency than it strikes you as requiring.
3 practices to convey empathy:
Employees succeed best with customers when they are trained not only to be empathetic but to reliably convey that empathy to their customers.
Here are three ways a customer-facing team member can practice empathy.
1. Frame any request you make to a customer (e.g., for more information) as an ask, not a command.
For example, baldly demanding “Date of Birth?” is less than ideal; “May I have your date of birth?” is a notable improvement, even though it only requires four extra syllables.
2. Pay attention to the language you use with a customer, using language to convey that you’re on the customer’s side.
In particular, watch out for defensive language that may crop up, and practice replacing it with a better choice of words.
Customer service recovery (how you react to customers who complain) is a particularly important place to make sure your cues convey empathy. A great place to start in getting this right is to replace your instinct to use defensive language and to make use of neutral, positive language.
Replace defensive language, such as is found in these following phrases…
• “That’s not true.”
• “That’s not what happened.”
• “We would never have done that.”
• “You should have ______ [called in earlier, read the manual…]”
…with non-defensive, more neutral language:
Perhaps…
If I hear you right…
Alternatively…
3. Strive to keep in mind that this customer’s interaction is a unique experience for them – even though it may feel routine for you.
It’s important to “reset” before every customer interaction; it will keep you from rushing the customer, using shorthand or jargon that they may not understand, and from sounding jaded – even if you’ve had 15 similar calls today!
Once you develop your empathy for sensing what a customer is experiencing, and you polish your ability to convey this empathy, it’s remarkable how much smoother your interactions with customers will be. And this can lead to truly great business results.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Micah Solomon
Micah Solomon is a customer service improvement consultant and a bestselling author with 5 books that have won multiple awards; the most recent is Ignore Your Customers (and They’ll Go Away), published by HarperCollins.
Do you wish you were more productive? Join the club.
Four in ten Americans feel like they don’t have enough time1 to do what they want.
Improved productivity is the secret to getting more done faster, freeing up your time and boosting your happiness in the process.
But how, exactly, do you unlock more productivity?
Read on if you’re sick of sluggish mornings and never-ending to-do lists. We share seven proven ways to supercharge your productivity and get sh*t done faster.
1. Touch it once
The “touch it once” rule is simple: do not start a task until you are ready to complete it. This rule prevents you from opening your inbox and rereading the same email over and over again. It also prevents you from opening up a document to start working, sighing, and closing it back out.
Those mini-moments of procrastination are extremely de-motivating and trick you into thinking the task is more insurmountable than it really is.
Take a deep breath, promise yourself you’ll only touch something once, and get to work.
2. Follow the two-minute rule
The two-minute rule states that you must immediately do any task that can be completed in two minutes or less.
This one has no room for procrastination, and thank goodness for that. The two-minute rule is perfect for knocking out a bunch of email replies or those pesky administrative tasks that can build up and get ignored.
3. Clean up your workspace
Research increasingly suggests that clutter is bad for us. It stresses us out and drains our energy. Worst of all, clutter is closely linked with procrastination2, a serious productivity killer.
Trust us: it’s easier to finish tasks when you can see your desk. Clear up the clutter on your physical and digital desktops. You’ll have an easier time finding everything you need and feel less stressed: two things that make it easier to get tasks done fast.
Our minds wander 37% of the time3 we’re at work. No wonder it’s tough for us to get tasks done.
Fortunately, the Pomodoro technique is here to save the day. Created in the 1980s by a college student named Francesco Cirillo, it’s designed to keep you on task, no matter what wandering thoughts come up.
Here’s how the Pomodoro technique works:
Choose your task.
Set a timer for 25 minutes. (Bonus points if it’s shaped like a tomato. “Pomodoro” is the Italian word for tomato.)
Work on your task until the timer goes off.
Take a five-minute break. (Note: this should be a true break that lets your mind rest, not something stressful like checking emails. Try making yourself a cup of coffee, watching a YouTube video, or stepping outside.)
Set another timer for 25 minutes and repeat.
Once you’ve worked for four sessions, or about two hours total, take a longer 15 to 30-minute break. Then start over again.
5. Stop multitasking
We know multitasking is a touchy subject for some people. But, time and again, the statistics show that multitasking is bad news for productivity. In fact, some experts say it slows down productivity by as much as 40 percent!
When you’re working on a task, work on that task and that task only. Close your email inbox, log out of Facebook, and turn off notifications. Set your phone to “do not disturb” or place it on the other side of the room, where you won’t be distracted whenever it lights up.
6. Practice the Pareto principle
Also known as the 80/20 rule, the Pareto principle states that 80% of our results stem from only 20% of our efforts. In other words, we tend to spend most of our time on things that don’t matter as much. So, when you’re planning your work day, tackle the hard stuff first. You’ll find yourself getting more done faster.
A 2021 study backs this up. As the researchers state, “People that started a series of tasks with an easy task had significantly higher procrastination scores4 than those that started with a difficult task.”
7. Schedule a power hour
Want to get a lot of tasks done quickly? Schedule a weekly “power hour.” Developed by happiness researcher Gretchen Rubin, this is a time to tackle as many tasks as possible within one hour.
The one-hour time limit makes it fun. In a way, you’re challenging yourself to see how productive you can be! It also keeps things manageable. If it’s only one hour of your week, sticking to the routine and knocking out at least a few tasks is easier.
Pro Tip: Put on an energizing playlist to get yourself in the mood.
Get ready to speed through your to-do list
Adopt any of the techniques above, and you’ll find yourself getting tasks done faster in no time.
Are you ready to take your productivity to the next level? Check out NextivaONE.
If you’re like most people, you work with 15-20 different apps to get your job done.
Let us be the first to tell you: it doesn’t have to be this way!
NextivaONE combines the functionality of multiple apps — email, messaging, file sharing, video calls, SMS, and more — into one single dashboard. At last, it’s one app to rule them all.
Amelia Willson is a marketer-turned-freelance writer, based in sunny southern California. She covers health, technology, and digital marketing. When she’s not busy writing, you can find her at the beach or walking her dog Rockefeller.
Here are the latest insights from customer service consultant and bestselling author Micah Solomon…
There’s one type of interaction with customers that tends to be a hot mess: customer surveys (and the verbiage that’s sent out to accompany them).
Sending out poorly designed surveys can…
…waste the time of businesses and customers alike
…alienate (or at least irritate) even your most loyal customers
…mislead you with spurious results
Designed and deployed properly, however, surveys can reveal a lot about how customers view their experience while also treating respondents(and those who choose to not respond!) with respect. So I encourage you to spend a couple minutes with me now learning the do’s and don’ts of customer surveying.
Twelve Essentials of Effective Customer Experience Surveys
1. Every survey question should be clearly worded and easy to answer, not requiring your customer to do math or think too much about the inner workings of your company or industry. (Avoid anything along the lines of “Compare this interaction with interactions you’ve had at similar departments at other fintech companies in our broadly competitive cohort.” And don’t ask questions you don’t care about and know you’ll never act on.
2. Don’t ask your customers to grade you on a scale of 1-10, or, even worse, 0-10. If you ask for ratings on a scale of 1-10 or 0-10, what in the world are you thinking? There’s no customer on the planet who can determine the difference between a “6” and an “8” when filling out such a beast. My belief is that five choices is the maximum you should ever offer; three is even better.
3.The order in which you ask your questions matters. A lot. Be sure to ask for your customer’s overall impression first. You don’t want to influence how a customer answers this central answer by asking your more nitpicky questions first; asking several individual questions and only then getting around to asking for an overall rating will color that overall rating significantly.
Think about it like this: If the question they encounter just before the overall question is about the cleanliness of your restrooms, and they feel those were just so-so, then they’re likely to reduce their overall rating of you as well (since you have their minds in the toilets); if you asked about availability of parking and they answer that that was abundant, it’s likely to artificially increase it (since you’ve got them thinking about something positive). This is why the most important question needs to go first.
4.Include at least one open-ended field, both to harvest customer insights and to let customers know that you’re actually interested in their thoughts and insights.
5. Word choice matters. I’m a fan of emotive answer choices, like “Fantastic!” (for your top score) and “Sketchy!” or even “Dreadful!” (for your lowest). Note: Such creative response options need to be consonant with your brand style to work. They won’t be appropriate for a formal company or one in a life-and-death industry like healthcare.)
6. Pay at least as much attention to the number of top ratings (especially on your first, most general question) as to your overall average satisfaction score.That’s because this top number is the best representation of how many true loyalists—or, at least, customers who are well on their way to true loyalty—you have.
7. If your survey is a long one,figure out a way to let customers stop mid-survey without getting scolded (and then invalidated) for the questions they didn’t get to.
8. Don’t ask intrusive demographic questions (such as income, gender, or age) without making the questions optional. Don’t be so vainglorious as to assume that respondents will actually trust your privacy practices.
Also, unless you’re a casino operator, professional pornographer, cannabis dispenser, or someone otherwise limited by law to serving adults (or if you’re in healthcare, banking, or another highly regulated field), there’s no reason to ask for a complete birthdate including year of birth.
(If you’re trying to be cute and set yourself up to later send out birthday cards, please at least stop asking for the year of birth; a complete birthdate is a. none of your business and b. makes identity theft all too easy in case of a breach.)
9. Scan your survey responses right away for any complaints or ultra-low scores. Then respond personally and immediately to these upset customers, even before you do any review or analysis on the entire batch.
10. Send a personal thank-you note (email is fine) to anyone who gave you a compliment in a free-form field. Again, do this as promptly as possible.
11. Pay attention to the comments with which you introduce the survey and the survey request. These should be friendly, gracious, and brand appropriate. That way, whether or not the recipient chooses to respond, they’ll get a positive impression.
12. Don’t hound people who don’t respond to your survey mailings. I would make a single follow-up reminder the limit (or even zero follow-ups, though I know that’s hard to stick to). And, once you’ve surveyed a particular customer, suppress future surveys for at least 30 days.
Want even more help with surveys? Nextiva has built-in survey capability. Talk to an expert today.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Micah Solomon
Micah Solomon is a customer service improvement consultant and a bestselling author with 5 books that have won multiple awards; the most recent is Ignore Your Customers (and They’ll Go Away), published by HarperCollins.
Being productive helps you get work done more quickly and faster while avoiding distractions. You could sit down in front of your MacBook and call it productivity, but the next thing you know, 10 hours have long passed, and you’re still stuck at one task. Or you might end up wasting a lot of time on distractions such as regular breaks or spending half of the time going through a web page.
To improve your productivity, you’ll need to have undivided attention. However, when you’re faced with issues that arise from being productive, you’ll need to try some new strategies.
If you’re a Safari browser user, there are some good browser extensions that help you get work done more easily. Here are our picks for the top extensions that would help you through the day with fewer distractions and improved productivity.
1. 1Password
1Password helps to save passwords used for different sites and several logins.
Most sites require users to use a strong, unique, and secure password, and most times, the password used may be alphanumeric with some symbols. It could get really frustrating to start remembering and typing the password each time you try to log in.
Each time you try to login into the site, you can input a single password. 1Password doesn’t just make logging into any site easier and faster; it also helps to keep your passwords safe and secure.
2. Blue Canoe Dictionary
If you need a good dictionary that helps with pronunciation, a Blue Canoe Dictionary is just what you need. This extension creates an encyclopedia of words selected on the webpage and displays the meaning. There’s an option for users to click to listen to the pronunciation, which doesn’t end there; it also gives instructions on how to pronounce the words.
So if you are in a hurry and need to look up the meaning of a word and learn how to pronounce it, especially when preparing for a zoom meeting, you have nothing to worry about, as this extension will certainly help you save time while improving your productivity.
3. Evernote Web Clipper
Evernote Web Clipper improves productivity by letting you save any webpage, article, or blog to your Evernote account for future referencing.
Evernote, for those who aren’t familiar with the program, is an online note-taking extension that lets you collect images, text, articles, webpages, and more by “grabbing” any webpage you’re currently looking at with a single click for viewing at a time more convenient to you in the future.
4. WasteNoTime
Time is of the essence, and if you’ve noticed, it is effortless to get distracted each time you’re working on some tasks, which is where this Safari Extension comes in.
WasteNoTimehelps improve productivity by blocking sites, links, and web pages so you’re not distracted when working on a task. WasteNoTime also lets users know how much time they’ve spent on a specific webpage. This extension is just what you need to keep your focus.
5. Pocket
Do you ever find yourself reading articles and realize that you don’t have time because you have other things to attend to? Pocket helps you save those articles or notes to your account so you can easily go back to them later.
One good thing about Pocket is that it enables you to organize articles neatly – you only need to add a tag and label it for easy access and recognition.
How Does Productivity Software Work?
No matter your business size, Nextiva’s productivity software is made to increase team productivity and improve customer experiences. The best benefit is that your team can do all work from single tool.
Nextiva’s business software solution gives users access to the following features:
Automation
It allows for collaboration, such as video meetings as well as text messaging
Users can share data and sync
It allows users to share files and documents
Access to shared interaction history
Access to interaction insights
All these features are accessible from one platform so you don’t have to jump from one application to another. It also ensures that all your data and information are safe.
Blair Williamson was a Content Marketing Manager at Nextiva. Her background is marketing in higher education and tech. She geeks out on WordPress, kettlebells, and whatever book she's currently reading.
It’s a goal many of us share. From tips and tricks articles to expert interviews, you can find no shortage of online advice to help you be more productive.
But if you’re looking for the fastest, most straightforward route to boosting your productivity, it may lie closer to home than you think.
If you want to be more productive, you can start by simply asking your colleagues for feedback.
Surprised? We thought you might be. Here’s why this technique is so effective:
When you ask for feedback from people who know you and your work habits, you receive productivity advice that’s tailored specifically to you. That’s the key difference between personal feedback and the other productivity advice that’s out there. It’s literally made for you!
You just need to know how to ask for it. Read on as we share 10 tips to ask for feedback, and how you can use feedback to supercharge your productivity, and get more out of your work life.
1. Ask for feedback often
Many people wait until their quarterly or annual review to get feedback. We’re going to let you in on a little secret: you don’t have to wait.
You can ask for feedback any time of the year.
The more often you ask for feedback, the better actually, as you have more opportunities for growth.
Regularly asking for feedback helps you escape bad productivity habits more quickly. It also deepens your relationship with your colleagues. As a result, you can work together better moving forward, removing relationship-based bottlenecks and ensuring a smoother project timeline.
2. Ask the right people
Who should you ask for feedback?
Ask for feedback from people who meet these two key requirements:
They have direct experience working with you.
You can trust them to be honest with you.
Remember, feedback doesn’t always have to be top-down. You can ask your peers for feedback.
If you are a manager, you can ask your team for feedback on your management style.
If you want to improve a particular skill, ask someone who you admire for doing that skill particularly well.
3. Ask at the right time
It’s best not to spring a feedback request on someone.
Either schedule time to meet, and give them a heads up that you’ll be asking for feedback, or request feedback in a written manner. Give the person time so they can provide a more thoughtful response.
Also, be mindful of what’s going on with them and avoid asking for feedback during times of high-stress, like right before a big deadline.
Pro Tip: If you’re using NextivaONE, you can create a calendar invite for your feedback conversation without leaving the app you’re working in. No need to toggle back and forth to another screen!
4. Use the right medium
Feedback can be formal or informal. Consider the preferences of the person you are asking, as well as how much feedback you are looking for. A quick, direct question can be answered via chat or email, but some people may find it easier to expound on their thoughts in person or over video call.
5. Ask specific questions
People can provide more constructive feedback if you ask more specific questions. Instead of an open-ended “What feedback do you have for me?”, you could ask:
How can I improve my time management skills?
I would like to be promoted to X position. What skills should I develop to get there?
I am struggling to meet X goal. What advice can you give me to be more productive?
In the project we just completed, what did I do well? What could I have done better?
Sometimes I get distracted when working from home. How do you stay on task?
6. Listen to feedback
As the person provides their feedback, listen to what they are saying. If you don’t quite understand something, ask them to clarify. Jot down key notes to help you remember.
Taking notes shows that you take this seriously and value the person’s time. Plus, it gives you something to look back on — not only as you work towards becoming more productive, but a few months or a year down the line, when you can look back and see how far you’ve come!
Pro Tip: In NextivaONE, you can take notes on calls as well as on individual contacts, which makes it easy to keep your feedback organized. Plus, automatically-generated transcripts are instantly searchable, just in case you forgot part of your conversation.
7. Be receptive to feedback
It’s good to adopt a growth mindset when asking for feedback. Made famous by psychologist Carol Dweck, a growth mindset describes believing that your talents are not “fixed”; rather, you can develop them through sustained effort, a little strategy, and regular feedback from others.
People who have a growth mindset don’t fear feedback as a negative assessment of their self-worth.
Instead, they welcome it as positive information that can help them learn and grow. Approaching feedback with this mindset can help you better receive and act on the feedback your colleagues provide.
8. Be appreciative
Whenever someone takes the time to provide you with feedback, take the time to thank them for doing so. This doesn’t have to be a grand gesture.
A simple “thank you” goes a long way towards strengthening your relationships and keeping the door open for more feedback in the future.
9. Implement the feedback
Successfully implementing feedback is all about knowing what works for you.
Are you someone who works better when you have an accountability partner? Tell a coworker or friend about the new changes you are making to reach your goals, and ask them to check in on you to make sure you’re putting the feedback into practice.
Are you working toward better time management? Experiment with different techniques, such as blocking out time on your calendar or following the Pareto principle.
10. Celebrate your progress
Finally, make feedback fun! Give yourself a pat on the back everytime you ask someone for feedback. It can be vulnerable to put yourself out there!
Then, as you set your goals for implementing the feedback, set milestones, too. Each time you reach a milestone, not only will you get to take a moment to celebrate your success, but you’ll feel more motivated to keep going — creating a positive cycle of productivity improvement!
Get more feedback, enjoy more productivity
Asking for feedback is a smart way to improve your productivity. So is using productivity software.
With productivity software like NextivaONE, you can finally enjoy all the tools you need to be productive. Say goodbye to that mess of apps you’ve been using and manage video calls, chats, customer surveys, file sharing, and more — all from one app.
At last, it’s a work hub that works for you, not against you.
Amelia Willson is a marketer-turned-freelance writer, based in sunny southern California. She covers health, technology, and digital marketing. When she’s not busy writing, you can find her at the beach or walking her dog Rockefeller.
