Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

By Brooke Chaplan

As a business owner, you have a lot on your plate. From taking care of monthly receivables to handling customer contacts via phone, you need to ensure that everything is in working order. When it comes to your business phone system, here are some likely areas that you can improve for your business operations. You can enhance the collaboration features, provide more mobility, offer a variety of connection mediums, evaluate customer preferences, and prepare a disaster plan. By following these tips, you can improve your business phone system.

Enhance collaboration features

One major area that many entrepreneurs can improve with their phone system is enhancing the amount of collaboration features their phones system takes advantage of. Collaboration features are just what they sound like: features that enable collaboration even from remote employees by connecting them with other departments and shared information. It’s important to be able to offer features like video conferencing so employees from different geographical locations can all participate in meetings. Look into features that allow for additional contact methods like text or IM to get answers from other departments during conferences and meetings.

Provide more mobility

Today, most people use cell phones exclusively, and switching to mobile options can really enhance your staff’s presence and ability to respond to customer needs. Your phone system features shouldn’t be limited to just in-office phone lines. Rather, you should enhance your phone capabilities to all employee mobile devices as well. This way, your staff members can connect regardless of their location to get answers to their questions in real-time.

Offer various connection mediums

Traditionally, a business phone system was comprised of placing a telephone in each office that could vocally connect to other phones throughout the building. The truth is that this type of connection just doesn’t cut it for the new workforce. The new generations are more prone to forms of communication like texting and IM applications. Therefore, your phone systems should have these abilities to ensure that the new workforce can work effectively.

Evaluate your customer preferences

When it comes to connecting with your customers, you need to look at things from their perspective. Many don’t have the time to connect with your business via a traditional phone call during your normal hours of operation. However, they can send a text message at their leisure. Therefore, your phone system should be able to receive and send SMS messages.

Have a disaster plan

Things like bad storms, late employees, and downed power lines can mess with your business phone system. For this reason, you need to have a backup disaster plan ready to put into place. Many business phone systems offer cloud-based communication so you can send and receive calls from any mobile device.

Improving your business phone system starts with identifying its weaknesses. Hopefully, the information above has given you some definitive areas you can look at for improvement. Enhancing your business phone system should be an ongoing improvement throughout the life of your business.

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Brooke Chaplan is a freelance writer and blogger. She lives and works out of her home in Los Lunas, New Mexico. She loves the outdoors and spends most of her time hiking, biking, and gardening. For more information, contact Brooke via Facebook at facebook.com/brooke.chaplan or Twitter @BrookeChaplan.