Small Business Phones: The Basics

Small Business Phones: The Basics and Beyond

Small business phones used to be extremely basic. They offered a rotary dial or a keypad, a dial tone, and buttons for switching between lines and putting callers on hold. Today’s small business phones are far more advanced. They can connect to the Internet or to your company’s network and automatically route callers to the appropriate department or person. Your workforce can take their office phones with them wherever they go and always stay in touch. Advanced small business phones can help your company more effectively compete with larger organizations. Here are some ways you can use voice, conferencing, and unified communications to enhance the power of your small business phones:

• Enhance Collaboration
  Small business phones, when combined with data networks and computers, are no longer limited to voice. Today’s Internet Protocol (IP)-based phone systems let you combine voice, Web conferencing, unified communications and video into valuable collaboration tools. Employees can communicate over long distances in more meaningful ways, which speeds decision making, among other benefits.
• Improve Customer Relationships
  Adding customer contact center technology to your small business phones gives customers multiple ways to reach you—via phone, fax, email, or click-to-chat. This helps your support team provide faster, more targeted service.
• Free Your Workforce
  Today’s small business phones aren’t bound to a desk, and neither are employees. They're out on sales calls, at the airport, at home, working out of hotel rooms. All the while, they need to stay in touch. Workers can consolidate all incoming business calls to mobile, home office, or other phones with a single phone number and immediately receive calls wherever they’re working.
• Go Green, Save Green
  Small business phones with voice and Web conferencing enhance productivity and reduce travel costs, helping your company ‘go green’,which is increasingly important to consumers. You’ll save money on phone charges. A combined voice-data network also simplifies installation and management. And unified messaging reduces the amount of time employees spend managing messages.

Find out how Phoenix Managed Services telephony solutions can help your business.