For most business owners, one of their biggest pieces of software or hardware is their business phone systems. If you select the right one, it may provide you with a substantial competitive advantage over your local competitors. However, selecting a good one can also be confusing and problematic for a lot of different reasons. In this article, we’ll take a look at some of these challenges and give you some tips on how to select a good phone system for your business.
As mentioned above, many small businesses choose to go with a hosted PBX service. While this can provide them with great flexibility in terms of managing their telephone systems, there are also a number of challenges that they may run into. Some of these problems are related to distance and the difficulty of connecting calls from new geographic areas. Another issue that many small businesses have is the lack of available hardware. Hosted telephone systems are usually tied down by their Internet connection which can be less than effective and can make it difficult to place and receive calls when the service is down or slow.
Another issue that some small business phone systems have is the lack of portability. While some of these systems do provide a certain amount of portability, many of them only allow customers and clients to call on their systems via their cellular lines. Even if a call does successfully connect between the caller and the party dialing the number, the user will not be able to move around much as they would if they were using a conventional phone line. This means that if a customer or client lives in New York but needs to make a call to an office in Texas, for example, they will not be able to use their home phone line to make the call. This is often inconvenient and a problem for companies that rely on their business phone systems for communication to their customers on a regular basis.
Most business telephone systems also offer limited numbers of extension numbers. The smaller businesses that use these to place local calls may have very few numbers to speak of and may even have to hire extra hands to help out with calls that are answered by voice mail. This can also make it difficult for clients who want to place calls and get information about a particular company. Without a good number of extension numbers, a business phone system may not be able to accommodate all of these clients, as well as keep up with the volume of calls.
Finally, most business phone systems do not have an auto attendant. These are software programs that automatically answer calls and pass messages to the auto attendant that is assigned to the business by the system administrator. Although some people are hesitant to leave a message with this kind of service, there are many benefits of having a voice mail service like visual voicemail. For one thing, it is important that businesses have a live person to answer calls and messages because customers can never be too careful. Auto attendant software makes it less likely that customers will ignore or misunderstand an intended message because they do not have a live person to interpret the meaning in text.
Business telephone systems are great for most companies, but they can be a little tricky. There are many services and features that vary from one business to another. If you are looking for a phone system with all of these services and more, then you are better off to find a company that offers it. The more features you receive, the easier it will be for you to handle calls and messages. You also might find that you are better off with a cheaper telephone system than one that has a lot of bells and whistles.
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