Phone System Guide

typical business telephone system can provide hundreds of system features and when deciding on a telephone system for your business there are a few key features that you should consider as essential. All Business telephone systems will provide the basic of call transfer and call hold so we have listed the additional phone system features below, with an explaination of how they can benefit your business.

The standard features that are commonly used in a business phone system are:

• Auto Attendant: The auto attendant feature provides automatic answering of calls and can provide routing to the correct department, so that your customers and suppliers can be routed to the correct person as quickly as possible. The auto attendant ensures that your phone lines answer incoming calls and route them as necessary even if the operator is on a lunch break or calls come in outside of office hours.
• Conferencing: If you need to speak to multiple people simultaneously, a conferencing facility is required. Incoming calls can be transferred to specific extensions and a number of callers can be added to a single conference call.
• Music on Hold: This allows the caller to listen to a pre-selected soothing music while he is on hold. Many companies choose to put some informational/educational tips about their own products and services instead of making callers listen to music.
• Call Forwarding: This helps forward calls from one extension to another, enabling mobility of a single call to multiple users within your office environment.
• Voice Mail: Allows callers to leave messages in a voice mail box that provides users save and delete features. Voice mails are usually activated to tap incoming calls in case of absence from individual desk space. Voicemail is ideal when used in conjunction with DDI (Direct Dial In) numbers so that calls directly to an extension can be dealt with in an efficient manner.
• Caller Identification: helps track calls from identified and un-identified numbers. Display phones show the phone number with name of the caller if they are stored or only phone number if they are not associated to any name.
• Battery Back Up / UPS : This feature allows the phone system to operate despite power failures for about an hour depending on the type of your phone system.
• Mobile Extension: This feature allows external workers to use their mobile phone as an extension of the phone system and can be paired with an internal extension so that both the office extension and mobile will ring at the same time,  The mobile worker can transfer calls to other extensions and can even dial into the telephone system and use the business telephone lines to make calls, creating the effect that they are calling from the office.  The Mobile Extension calls are usually made over the business telephone lines, so there is an additional cost associated with the call to the mobile phone, but this can be overcome with the use of a GSM Gateway, which will enable calls to be made over the mobile phone network, which can mean free mobile extension calls when using the correct mobile phone tariff.