Your company's telephone system plays an obviously important role in its success by providing your direct line to customers, suppliers and key business contacts. In fact, a telephone system is often the first equipment a new business decides to buy.
As with other business systems and services, digital technology has evolved the basic office telephone far beyond its basic - yet still critical - role in conveying voice calls. Today's small business phone systems can perform a variety of call-handling functions, making the right choice somewhat challenging.
Fortunately, systems are flexible enough to allow business owners to start with a basic system and to expand as their company and its communications needs grow.
Getting Started
Today's business used telephone systems are sophisticated, offering a variety of standard features such as hold, transfer, redial, intercom and conferencing. Many special features are also available: music-on-hold, voicemail, automated attendant, paging, hands-free operation and call restrictions.
These additional features help to improve business productivity by making it easier for you to do business with your customers. For instance, remote location features allow employees in separate locations to call each other using internal extensions.
Newer features offered by many business phone systems include find me/follow me (which routes calls among a list of numbers until it is answered or is sent to voice mail), interactive voice response, shared message boxes, unified messaging (see related article) and more.
Your telephone system can represent an important financial investment. Like many technology purchases, an importing first step is to take a few moments to think about your business' communication needs and how you'll use its phone system. For instance, try to consider factors such as:
It is also important to consider how likely you'll be to use many of the features being offered. Features on some telephone systems can seem impressive, but may be too complicated to use on a daily basis. It is important to shop for a system that's easy for you and your employees to understand and use.
During your planning, consider the number and locations of the phone handsets that you're likely to need. Along with obvious choices such as each office or cubicle, consider areas such as conference rooms or other shared spaces where employees might need to make or receive calls.
Similarly, it's important to consider your phone system's power requirements. If you're using equipment installed on your premises, you should also install backup power supplies to ensure you can still make and receive calls during any power outages.
