VoIP phone systems are extremely flexible and come with lots of advanced but easy to use features you can customize to improve your business communications. Not only do they typically cost less than a traditional phone system, but they also allow you to do some things your older phone system probably can’t.
These features can help keep your team:
- stay connected
- create a better experience for your customers and clients
- and improve productivity
Let’s take a look at 5 of the best features and how they can help your business:
Auto-attendants
Auto-attendants act like a virtual receptionist and provide callers with automated answering, prompting, and call routing based on caller input, without the need for a live attendant. A caller can exit the menu to reach an individual extension at any time. Rather your callers get a live attendant during the day? No problem! You can configure the auto-attendant so it’s only reached when people call your number after hours, during lunch breaks, or holidays. It can also be configured to ring through to the auto-attendant only after a certain number of rings to your main number go unanswered. If you have one main number you can have menu options that ring through to different office locations or departments.
Find me/Follow me
Find Me/Follow Me allows users to route incoming calls to multiple phones that can ring simultaneously or in a specified sequence. This allows each user to create a unique call flow and failover for their extension. You can have your desk phone and your cellphone ring at the same time or only ring your cellphone after a certain number of unanswered rings at your desk. This feature gives you the freedom to conduct business wherever you need to go without the worry of missing important calls or being tethered to your desk. There is even a mobile app that enhances this feature by making your smartphone like another phone on your physical office extension.
This allows you to 3 digit dial other extensions at any office and place outgoing calls that will show the caller ID of your main office. This allows you to call customers and clients without giving them your cellphone number. We have many mobile clients in the legal, consulting, and medical fields that really love this feature!
Branch offices and working from home
If your VoIP phone system is cloud-based (like our Highbridge Communications Phone System) then the PBX that handles all your calls is located on servers that run in the cloud rather than being physically located in your office. This allows us to easily connect your various branch offices together through a single phone system.
This means you can easily transfer calls and 3 digit dial extensions from one office to another. We work with an investment firm that has offices in Syracuse and Albany and was was looking to open up a Rochester Branch. All they had to do in order to get the new Rochester branch connected was to purchase phones for those desks and connect them to their network/internet.
Need to work from home? No problem! Being that all the phone needs is a connection to the internet your employees can work from home, full time, or as needed. All they need to do is bring their phone physically home and connect it to their internet modem. As soon as it boots up it will work the same way it did in the office.
A lot of our clients have used this to seamlessly work from home during the COVID-19 Pandemic. They brought their office phones home and plugged them into their home internet connection. No one needs to know they are working in a different location. They just call the way they always do. When they place calls it shows the caller ID of the office – not their home or cellphone.
We have quite a few clients who have remote employees working remotely from other states. This allows them to have one interconnected phone system regardless of location.
Voicemail to email
This feature allows the VolP system to send a voicemail as an audio file attached directly to your email. This allows you to easily listen to, save, and forward voicemail messages from any computer, cellphone, or tablet from any location. If you prefer you can also have it transcribe the voicemail so you can read the message if you can’t listen to it right away.
When working from multiple locations you no longer have to worry about calling into the office to retrieve your messages – they all just come to you.
We work with a busy engineering firm that often has consultants out at sites and working from multiple locations. Having voicemail delivered to email helps them all stay in touch without having to call into the office for messages or wait until they are back in the office. This has increased their productivity and turnaround time on projects.
Faxing by email
Another very useful feature is the ability for everyone in your organization to be able to send faxes via email. To do so they simply attach the document they want to fax (Word, PDF, image, etc.) to an email and address it to FAXNUMBER@instant-fax.com. The attachment is then delivered to the fax machine on the other end.
We can also configure an incoming digital fax box and have faxes distributed via email to individuals or distribution groups. This allows your team to access important faxes from anywhere by receiving them in your email inbox as attachments. This makes it easy to save and forward digital copies of important faxes.
By having voicemail and faxes delivered via email anyone with a laptop, tablet, or smartphone has access to all the communications methods they need to work from anywhere.
Put these features to work for your business!
This is just the tip of the iceberg. There is a long list of features available with a cloud-based VoIP phone system that simply are not available on traditional phone systems. These enterprise-level features allow you to work where and when you want and make sure you never miss a call or an important message from your customers or clients. Want to put these features to work for your business? Get started today! Give us a call at 315-473-9600 for more information or to schedule a complimentary phone system audit so we can show you how easy and cost-effective it can be to switch to a VoIP phone system.
