How Halloo's Direct Inward Dial System Can Improve Your Small Business

Recently we had a question crop up on the Halloo forums that made for a great idea for your small business. The question was a technical one in nature, but one with widespread ramifications. Specifically, what is Direct Inward Dial, and how can it help you?

The question we had related to the All Extensions page, and what “DID” stands for. DID stands for Direct Inward Dial, and it allows users to add extra numbers to their account, which in turn can be attached to user extensions. This in turn allows specific callers to bypass an auto attendant system, allowing those callers to reach your users directly. In Halloo’s case, you can add those extra numbers for $4.95 a month, and they can be either local numbers or toll free.

And what this can do is several-fold. Not only does it offer up a good opportunity to help streamline your business contacts, allowing initial contacts to funnel through an automated attendant system until they reach their correct contact, but it also allows longer-term contacts and better customers to have “special access” to the system, a “direct line” to the contact of choice to allow them much simpler, much easier one-number access to “their” sales rep or customer service manager or the like.

Perhaps one of the hardest things to do in keeping your customers happy, and working with you, is making them feel special. Providing them with what amounts to special access to your customer service staff–even though it really isn’t special access so much as it is an unusual way to achieve that access–is a great way to improve the perception that you truly care about that customer. And when the customer believes that he or she is important to your organization, they’re more inclined to come back, and more inclined to do business with you in the future.

Perception is important. And a great way to improve the perception that your customers have of you, a great way to do just that is with a phone system that includes the Direct Inward Dial system. It’s a great way to supplement other cloud-based telephony systems, and often works with others that we’ve already mentioned (it depends at least somewhat on an auto attendant and works great with a toll-free number), so adding on extra numbers via a Direct Inward Dial system is just a smart idea.