Essential Components of a Winning Business Phone System

Whether your business is large or small, there are certain common requirements all businesses should expect their business phone system to meet. In this article, we’ll take you through what those are and why they’re important for you and your business. Here are all the things a great business phone system will be.

Forward-Thinking Business Phone Provider

Perhaps the most important point of scrutiny for you, whether you’re examining a prospective provider or your existing provider, is that they are forward-thinking in their approach, showing evidence of innovation and momentum relative to the market. After all, if other providers continue to bring out new and better features and services than your current provider, you’ll be left wanting to switch and switching isn’t always easy; it creates work for your system administrators and can be costly if you’re locked into a contract.

Today, a business phone system provider should really be branching out into the unified communications space. Rather than detracting from the quality of the business phone system offering, this adds functionality and creates a more seamless collaborative platform for users overall. For the provider, this means taking steps to provide you with encrypted business instant messaging, video conferencing and secure file sharing.

Feature-Rich Phone System Platform

When choosing your business phone system provider, you’ll want to know that all of the advanced features you need to build the call experience your customers deserve are available. This includes call recording, hunt group creation and multi-level interactive voice response (IVR) menus. You may also want features like custom audio uploads and call queue creation.

Non-Restrictive

No one likes to feel trapped or restricted, but many business phone system providers enforce restrictions on their customers. Whether it’s a lengthy contract you’re being locked into or the devices you’re permitted to use with their platform, it’s common to see providers impose some sort of limitation.

Not only is Yay.com’s business phone system compatible with any device or desk phone, but we’re also a monthly subscription service, meaning you’re free to stay with us as long (or as little) as you please. We’re confident that you’ll love our service, so we’ve no reason to force you to stay.

What’s more, our open API and webhooks are freely available to all of our customers. As part of our pledge to give customers the freedom they deserve, these services provide the tools to integrate with any application and to build handy, custom utilities, or to pull voice call data from our platform at will to use as you see fit.

Great Customer Support

Sometimes phone system configuration can be difficult, especially if your provider’s platform isn’t intuitive. That’s why great customer support is so important.

Great customer support can mean the difference between a seamless, stress-free transfer and setup process and an altogether more difficult experience. Any new system takes a bit of getting used to and it’s imperative that downtime is kept as close to zero as possible so your customers can continue to reach you.

If your prospective provider has a reputation for poor customer service, consider looking elsewhere, or at least buckle up for what is likely to be a bumpy ride.

Scalable Business Phone System

All businesses are after increased sales and overall growth. If your business phone system can’t scale with your business as you bring on new staff and move to larger offices, then you’re in for a problem down the line. Thankfully, most modern VoIP solutions are inherently much more scalable than old-fashioned, on-premise PBX phone systems. By hosting switchboard functionality in the cloud, you’re able to create call routes, add or delete users and change extensions and other components of your phone system on the fly from wherever you are.

It’s worth double-checking that the advanced phone system features you’ll need (see above) as your business grows are on offer from the provider you’re looking at, too. Whether you’re adding new offices up and down the country, or you’re just fleshing out new and existing departments at your present location, you’ll want to know that the tools you need to continue offering the best call experience possible will be on-hand when you need them.

It might be useful to refresh your VoIP knowledge by visiting our comprehensive guide -  What is VoIP, where you'll learn what VoIP is and how it works - for a deeper understanding of how VoIP solutions manage to be more scalable and feature-rich than traditional solutions.

Conclusion

On the whole, any great business phone system provider will show evidence of a progressive, forward-thinking approach to new feature and service releases. They’ll offer a stable, reliable platform that scales, as well as top-notch customer support you can trust for when you need it most.

Perhaps most importantly, you’ll want to know that your provider has all of the powerful features you need to make creating the best possible call experience for your customers easy. Without the necessary features, you’ll only ever be able to cobble together something that’s not your ideal phone system.

Finally, it may be important to you that your provider doesn’t restrict you to costly hardware devices or lock you into lengthy contracts. Yay.com’s monthly subscription model means you can cancel or move away at any time; we’re confident that you’ll love us enough to stay with us. What’s more, our platform is compatible with any and all VoIP hardware devices. If you’d prefer, our unified communications apps are available on all platforms and operating systems and include features like one-click calling, secure business instant messaging and encrypted file sharing.

If you’re interested in learning more about the services we offer at Yay.com, sign up for your free trial today or begin comparing voice plans right away.