Why Having a Good Phone System Is Important for Your Business
Here are 9 great reasons why having a good phone system is important for your business (click on each one to learn more):
1. Improves Communication with Your Customers
2. Improves Internal Communication
3. Allows You to Work from Anywhere and Still be Available through a Central Number
4. Portrays a Professional Image for Your Business
5. Helps You Separate Your Work Life from Your Private Life
6. Makes It Easier to Scale as Your Business Grows
7. Helps to Lower Costs
8. Simplifies Your Communication – voicemail(taking messages)
9. Helps to Improve Your Security
1. Improves Communication with Your Customers
A good phone system will help you improve your communication with your customers. It can do this in several ways including:
Voicemail to email:
A good phone system will include this great feature that will take a voicemail and send it to your email program. The email you receive will include details about the call and will have an audio file of the message that you simply click to listen to.
More advanced voicemail to email features will even transcribe your voicemail message to you can read it. This is a great feature especially if you need to take notes of something said in the message like a phone number as the program will write it down for you. It also makes it easier for you to look back on previous messages. You can quickly read them instead of having to listen to them again.
Email is still the most used messaging system in most offices, so having your voicemails come into your inbox will make it easier and faster for you to check your voicemail and keep in touch with your customers.
Voicemail to email is a great feature that will improve your communication with your customers
Seamless Call Forwarding:
This feature will forward a call to another number or numbers if the initial line is busy or no one picks it up based on certain conditions that you set ahead of time. For instance if a call comes in from a certain country, then it could be set to be forwarded to another person in your organization that deals with customers from that country as well. Other conditions that can determine where a call is forwarded include:
- The caller’s identity
- The area code of the call
- The phone number
More advanced call forwarding will allow you to set different rules for different situations. For example you could set it up that if the phone in your office doesn’t get answered after a certain number of rings, it will forward it to your cell phone. You could also have it set up that the call gets forwarded to more than one number at the same time. Once one phone picks up the call, the others will stop ringing. This is a great feature that will help to improve your customer service by making sure their calls get answered by someone.
Call Notifications:
Call notifications are great if you want to make sure you don’t miss a call from an important contact. It uses caller ID and will send you an email whenever the number of the contact that you want to be notified about calls your business line. The email will contain a timestamp and information about the caller.
Advanced call forwarding will allow you to set different rules for different situations
2. Improves Internal Communication
Not only will a good phone system help to improve communication with your customers, but it will also improve communication among your employees.
Teleconferencing:
A good phone system will include a teleconferencing feature. Teleconferencing is a wonderful option to bring employees together from all over your organization, especially if you have remote offices. It can be done at a fraction of the cost of travelling to meetings and booking meeting facilities.
Each member of the call can use a toll-free number with an access code to join in the virtual conference room where you are able to interact effectively with the chairperson and other attendees. Often these calls can be done in conjunction with video conferencing over the Internet so everyone can see presentations and ask and answer questions.
Improved Collaboration:
A good VoIP phone system will give you the ability to share documents or work on the same documents at the same time as your co-workers. You can do this easily through programs such as Microsoft Teams and Avaya One Cloud that let connect your phone system to your computer apps so you can work all in one location.
Programs such as Avaya One Cloud let you share documents with coworkers – Image source: Avaya
3. Allows You to Work from Anywhere and Still be Available through a Central Number
With so many people now working remotely or from home, having a business phone system that will connect your office phone to any cell phone or mobile device is so important. You need a phone systems that lets you work from anywhere and still be available through a central number. It’s the perfect option for working:
- At home
- At another branch
- At a satellite office
- On a business trip
A good business phone system will let you connect no matter where you are working
4. Portrays a Professional Image for Your Business
A good phone system will help you portray a more professional image whether you have 1 or 100 employees. It can make your small business seem like a huge one. It will also give you access to great features that a personal phone line often doesn’t have such as:
Call Forwarding:
Call forwarding is a great feature that ensures that your callers are forwarded to another number if the initial line that they are calling is busy or unavailable. For example, if a caller calls your main business line and the line is busy or it is outside of regular business hours, the call could be directed to voicemail. Or if a caller calls a certain department, then all the phones in that department could be programmed to ring at the same time until the call is picked up. Or if you are out of the office, then your calls could be forwarded to your mobile or coworker’s extension.
Call Routing:
Call routing is similar to call forwarding but a little more sophisticated. With call forwarding, the caller is usually put on hold until the right person is reached but call routing connects you to the correct person immediately based on different criteria that is set up by your system’s administrator.
For example, you can enter individual call ID’s in the system memory and set up rules for each ID so that when a particular ID calls in it can be directed to a certain person, go directly to voicmail, or be forwarded to a coworker. It can also be set up so that callers can direct themselves to the extension they want by following the auto attendant’s instructions.
Call forwarding and call routing are similar but slightly different in how they work
Recorded Messages:
Even if you don’t have an actual receptionist, a business phone system can make it seem like you do. You can have professional sounding recorded messages that will make your small business seem much larger.
Automated Assistant:
An automated assistant takes the virtual receptionist one step further. It can help to automatically direct incoming calls to the appropriate person or department. It greets your callers and then presents them with menu options which the caller can interact with using their keypad or voice to be directed to the proper destination.
Hold music:
Rather than listening to dead air, hold music can make your caller’s experience much more pleasant. You can even intersperse the music with informative messages like your business hours or special promotions to further enhance the user experience.
A great phone system can help your smaller business portray a professional image
5. Helps You Separate Your Work Life from Your Private Life
A good business phone system can help you keep your work life separate from your private life. If you give your personal cell number to a client, then they are able to contact you at anytime, even when you are not working.
Having a good business phone system means that you only give your customers your business phone number; you don’t need to give out your personal information to them. You can set up your phone system so that when clients call your business number and you are out of the office, it can be forwarded to your cell number during the hours that you want to be available.
When you are not working, and a client calls your business number, you can program it to go to voicemail, or you can have them transferred to a co-worker who may be covering your calls for you while you are away. This allows you to choose the times you are available and effectively lets your keep your work and personal life separate, while still providing excellent customer service to your clients.
6. Makes It Easier to Scale as Your Business Grows
In the past businesses needed to install a PBX system in order to have one outside number that customers would call. PBX stands for Private Branch Exchange. A PBX phone system automatically answers all your calls and routes them to the correct user extension or department.
On-site PBX systems are very expensive to set up because you need to purchase your own server and hardware and you need to continually keep it maintained because you own the equipment. Cloud PBX on the other hand, is less expensive to set up and expand because you don’t have to purchase your PBX hardware.
A good PBX phone system that is hosted in the cloud is incredibly easy to scale. Traditional PBX systems had a limited number of extensions, so you would have to add in more lines if you wanted to expand your system. This was a time-consuming and costly process.
In the past, a PBX system was not an option for smaller businesses or start-ups due to the high initial costs to purchase the necessary equipment, the space needed to house the equipment and the expertise required to keep it running. However, lower costs and the fact that you don’t need to house your equipment means that cloud PBX is available for almost any business that wants to have this type of service. And the great news is that as you grow, you simply need to plug in more phones to your network.
You can easily scale your phone system as your business grows
7. Helps to Lower Costs
A good phone system can help you lower costs. Here are some way it can do this.
No Long Distance Charges: Using VoIP phones that connect to your cloud PBX through the internet means that you can avoid the expensive long-distance fees that traditional landlines have.
Lower Maintenance Fees: If you own your own PBX phone system, then you are responsible for all maintenance and replacement costs. If you switch to a cloud phone service provider, your provider owns all of the equipment. They are also responsible for its maintenance. All you need to do is purchase the IP phones to connect to your system and your cloud PBX provider through your internet connection.
Fewer Lost Leads: A good phone system can be programmed in such a way that you won’t lose any leads due to missed communication opportunities. If a client calls in and you are unavailable, your phone system can direct them to another line, to your mobile, or to your voicemail. You can then follow up with them as soon as possible.
Greater Efficiency: A good phone system can save you time and money by helping you increase your efficiency.
A good business phone system can save you time and money
8. Simplifies Your Communication
Having a good business phone system can greatly simplify the communication in your organization by providing you with helpful features such as:
Voicemail: Voicemail is a great way to ensure that you don’t miss important messages. Unlike pieces of paper that can get lost, your voicemail is easy to locate and if you use a voicemail to email feature, you may never miss a message again.
Call Queueing: This feature will ensure that your customers’ calls are answered in a timely fashion. It is a great feature for improving your customer service.
Call Transfers: Being able to transfer your calls to your mobile is another way to improve on your communication with your contacts.
Call queueing will help you answer your customers calls in a timely fashion
9. Helps to Improve Your Security
A good phone system can also help you improve your security. For example, if your employees are using their personal devices then your proprietary information such as call logs and customer information will be stored on those devices.
This means that if they leave your business and get another job, your information could go with them. In addition, if they lose their cellphone or get it stolen, your data could also be compromised. Having a cloud business phone system will help to protect your proprietary information because all your information will be stored on the cloud.
A reliable cloud phone service provider can also provide you with the security tools to keep your information safe such as:
- end-to-end encryption
- firewalls
- content filtering
- data backups
When choosing your service provider make sure that they offer security safeguards as part of your service package.