When it comes to office equipment and devices, office phone systems are critical. It’s crucial to choose the right office phone system from the right phone company, some like 8×8 even offer an integrated contact center, voice, team chat, meetings, and embeddable communications so your employees can interact easily without leaving their workstations, which maximizes productivity and traffic in your office space.

Below are some helpful tips when buying office phones for your small business:

 Consider Taking Certified VoIP Phones

Certified Voice over Internet Protocol or a VoIP phone system are ready-to-use because they are pre-configured. You can mix and match them with your other office phones, making it easier to optimize your business phone system. You can also use cell phones or landlines in addition to VoIP-compatible phones. With the best telecom plan, you can make calls from any device.

 Align the Office Phone Features to Your Needs

Even if you’re just a startup or small business, it pays investing in state-of-the-art office phones. However, you have to make sure that you select the best features that align with your needs. Take into account the scalability of your business or your business growth within two or more years. Do you see your small business growing soon? You don’t want to end up buying another set of office phones because you need additional features.

Here are the best features of modern office phones for small business:

• Attendant: This is a virtual assistant that initially answers all incoming calls using a custom greeting. A caller may choose options for different departments, extensions, or prerecorded messages based on how you want to customize it. Small businesses benefit from using this feature because it eliminates the need to hire a receptionist, which is applicable if you’re renting a very small office.
• Extensions: It’s important to have multiple extensions. In that way, calls will be routed to the right people. Find one with message extensions and mailbox only extensions. Calls between extensions are typically free, which can save you a lot of money with call charges.
• Follow Me: Some office phone systems are more sophisticated. For instance, when you’re at your office desk, all calls will automatically route to your office phone. When you leave, all calls will automatically route to your smartphone. This feature is beneficial if you don’t want to miss important calls, most especially for start-up and small businesses.
• Inbound Faxing: Receive faxes via a hosted PBX system and send it to the user via work email as a PDF attachment. With this feature, the server detects all inbound fax messages, and your phone number becomes your business fax number.
• Conference: Choose an office phone system with reliable built-in conference features. It will allow you and other users to join in on an important conference call without the hassle of making arrangements in advance. Get to work with more of your employees without leaving their workstations, saving you time, money, and effort.
• Call Recording: This is accomplished by just clicking your computer mouse, eliminating the need to set up the software to record calls. All recorded messages are stored for later retrieval.
• Call Scheduling: This feature is sometimes called time-based routing. It allows managers and business owners to set specific call schedules or call routes at certain times, regardless if it is nighttime, weekends, or holidays.
• Call Queue: It allows calls to wait until an available agent is ready to take the call. It’s like a waiting room wherein callers are put in a call queue.

Consider Your Office Space: Where to Set Up Your New Office Phones

Renting an office can be challenging, most especially if you need to expand your business. Sometimes, growing businesses need to find another location because of the growing number of employees and office equipment. Using the latest office phone systems eliminate the need for moving out and transferring into a wider and larger office. Of course, you have to consider a lot of things like the space to put in your office supplies, tools, and equipment. For a small business, you’ll find small and medium-sized office phone systems.

 Aside from taking into consideration the number of staff members you have with you, renting an office space would also require you to think of your future growth. Ask yourself if you would need a new office phone system to use like what other big businesses use, or settle for traditional landline phones.

Compare Prices

 Not all office phones are the same, so prices vary depending on the features you need. You can always check product review sites to compare prices and read what previous customers say about the product. Business phone systems either come as key systems, VoIP, or PBX systems. The price range is from $30 to $1,000 per extension.

 Check for the Service Warranty

As a small business owner, you want to focus on your business and dedicate less time servicing your office phones. That’s why you have to ask the manufacturer or seller about the warranties and guarantees involved in the purchase of office phones for your small business.

Conclusion

Why settle for less if your small business can be successful using more efficient and reliable phone systems? Your office phone system is a powerful tool because you use it to communicate with your customers, partners, investors, suppliers, and other significant people in your business. It’s only imperative to invest in high-quality business phone systems to ensure that you get the most out of your hard-earned money.