When you're researching small business phone systems, it's easy to get bogged
down in the details. There are dozens of companies providing business telephones, and all of them have their “exclusive” features and long lists of obscure technologies they support.
But what do you actually need?
There's an easier way to research the best business phone options for your business. If you simply focus on your own firm's needs, it makes it far easier to sort through the tangle of technology and terminology.
Telecommunication technologies today are about far more than simply making telephone calls – they're the backbone and central nervous system for the body corporate. Your business phones link you with your customers, with other offices, with workers at home, and with global operatives around the world.
The right telephone and networking systems can put your business in a position to go wherever it is your business wants to go, and that's the key.
If possible, try to schedule some time to talk to your President, COO, or other high-ranking officer. Spend some time seriously talking about where your operations are headed, and where your company plans to be in five years.
Here are a few areas to consider:
Your company is still using copper-wire telephone service.
Your first priority should probably be to get off of standard copper-wire service and move towards a Voice-over-IP setup instead. This is the first step towards any globalized office setup, as traditional telephone services simply cannot offer the features necessary to integrate your communications into a modern communications package.
VoIP allows your telephones to be integrated into your network, and turns all your communications into Internet-based data. It opens up a world of possibilities for expanding how your business operates, from better telecommuting, to full video-conferencing, to messaging that changes formats based on where you are.
Your company is going multi-office.
A multi-office setup virtually requires telephony that supports vWLAN networking. vWLAN allows networks to be expanded across multiple offices, creating unified telephony that ties your offices together.
Employees can have truly standardized and portable extensions that are preserved no matter what office they're in, with unified security policies across every location. Telephone systems can become extremely personalized in such a setup as well, with custom-made IVR and hold music systems that every employee can set up for themselves.
This turns your distributed company into a single entity, so that geographical divisions are invisible to both your workers and your clients.
Your phone lines are constantly growing.
As your company adds employees, of course, that means adding phone lines as well. Once you start growing beyond 4-6 lines, simply adding enough telephones can become a financial drain on your operations.
In this case, we recommend a telephone system based around a hosted solution. This allows you to cut the “phone company” out of the picture entirely for hardware, with all of your telecommunications handled in the cloud. All you would be paying for is the bandwidth itself from your ISP; everything else is under your control.
If employee growth is in your future, now is the time to start looking at investing in a hosted phone system, rather than having to upgrade an on-site system again in a couple years.
Get Advice From Experts
Of course, if you're really feeling lazy, you could always just ask for advice...
No matter where your business is headed, Hummingbird Networks is happy to help you get there! We have the experience necessary to recommend the perfect network and telephone systems for your business. We've spent the last decade helping small and medium-sized businesses create the infrastructure necessary for globalization, and that expertise can work for you too.
Whether you have two workers, or two hundred, contact us today and we'll put together a business phone system that's within your budget, solves the problems your facing today, and opens up new possibilities for the future!