What is DNIS? The Dialed Number Identification Service, or DNIS, is a way for business operators to organize inbound callers into the topics they are calling about by using special inbound telephone numbers.
That, on the surface, may not immediately describe exactly what a DNIS is, but it sets a necessary foundation for understanding one of the most common questions asked about business telephone systems today. Remembering, though, that DNIS numbers are capable of giving your employees a head start on their calls will frame much of their true power into a business context.
Often times, businesses that are investigating new business telephone systems are attracted to the many advantages of a hosted PBX option over a standard, on-site telephone system. The cost savings of a cloud-based telephone service such as VoIP over a legacy, copper-wire platform are often enough to get companies to switch. More often than not, the added functionality and flexibility of VoIP with features such as DNIS end up being the icing on the cake, too. Being able to add, remove, and manage multiple telephone numbers for pennies on the dollar over what an older telephone system would cost makes understanding what DNIS numbers are and how to use them effectively more important now than ever for establishing a competitive advantage in the marketplace.
How Do DNIS Numbers Work?
As a way to sort inbound callers based on their needs, DNIS numbers give advance warning of the exact reasons for a call before an employee even answers it. Even for the most difficult to impress clients, that’s an impressive and expedited way to deliver the best customer experience possible. VirtualPBX DNIS numbers are numbers selected from our proprietary bank of tens of thousands of local, international, and toll free business telephone numbers that have been given a special designation to your particular business operations. That exact designation is limited only by the bounds of your imagination in that we currently have DNIS in use for dozens of categories of reasons for our customers.
What is DNIS? To help illustrate the DNIS meaning and some of the more common ways to leverage this feature, we’ve outlined some of the more popular ones below.
- Track ROI on Promotional Spending Lets say you want to venture into print advertising, billboards, or any other new medium for your business that can’t be tracked with digital methods like UTM codes. To gauge the effectiveness of the campaign, you could ask all of your inbound callers how they found you, or you could just put a DNIS number on the printed advertisement and then you’d know anyone using that number got it from the advertisement in question. That type of data is also available real time with your Dash VoIP account, too. Plus, that’s way more accurate and appealing to showcase in your next marketing dashboard than all of the hash marks made by your team.
- Assign Team Leaders to Key Accounts For strategic accounts, you want to have your best people handling them at all times. That’s not to say everyone on your team isn’t capable of handling the demands of your most important accounts, but it does mean that they would also benefit from the enhanced service of being recognized as a strategic account off the bat. By giving a DNIS to these clients, your inbound team can immediately know they are about to field a call from a particular tier of business, giving everyone the chance to treat the call with the importance it requires.
- Bilingual Business We have telephone numbers for businesses from well over 100 countries across the globe, and as a result, we also have customers with a variety of different language requirements. Being able to ensure that your language-specific callers reach the team members who can help them quickly and smoothly is another way to use DNIS.
- Assign Numbers to Specific Products For companies with large divides in the products or services they provide, dividing the inbound traffic to the appropriate parties is another useful way to leverage DNIS numbers. Because product specialists are, well, specialized in their particular area of expertise, they need to be used as effectively and efficiently as possible. And having them only fielding calls pertinent to their area of expertise is far more effective than having them transfer out calls to other team members.
How Would You Use DNIS?
Keeping the DNIS meaning at top of mind, the examples shown in this blog are only a few of the variety of ways a company can use DNIS for their operations. How would you use them for you company that we haven’t listed here? Make sure to let us know on Twitter and Facebook, or better yet, you can even sign up for a free consultation on all of the possible ways that a unified communications system can benefit your business today! Looking for an explainer on the differences between DNIS, DID, and DISA? We’ve got that too!
