3 Ways to Configure Any Business Phone System

 

One of the things that makes a virtual phone system great is that it is so versatile and adaptable, no matter how many or what kind of phones your business will be using. In this post, you’ll find 3 specific configurations that you can use to make sure every business call that comes in will be served quickly and be directed to the correct person, every time.

 

1. Single Cell Phone

If you are currently running your small business from your cell phone, rest assured that there are a multitude of other business owners who are doing the exact same thing. Using a virtual system like Talkroute is the perfect solution for that scenario, and your customers will never know that you are taking every call on a single cell phone. Here’s how it works:

Add a call menu

It doesn’t matter if you have one business phone or 50 of them; a virtual phone system lets you set up a call menu, a.k.a. and auto attendant or phone tree, to manage your calls professionally. The caller will hear a menu prompt, from which they can select the number from their dial pad that routes to the correct person or “department”.

Add business-grade voicemail

When you take all your calls from your personal cell phone, the voicemail feature that comes with the phone tends to pose a problem due to a sometimes limited capacity, challenges with managing messages, among other difficulties. You get professional voicemail with your virtual system that goes beyond the standard features of personal cell phone voicemail.

Hold queues for multiple incoming calls

Handling multiple simultaneous business calls is basically impossible to do with your cell phone, by itself. A virtual system such as Talkroute gives you the ability to stack calls on hold in a queue until you are able to answer them. You can even play music or promotional messages for callers while they are holding.

 

2. Mixture of Phones (cell, home phone, office phone)

Are you running a home-based business? Or are you constantly on the move, between your home, office, and the road? Most likely then, you have separate phones for each of those places. If that’s the case, then seamlessly connecting all of them with a unified phone system is not a problem. Check out these structure options to unify your mixture of different phones.

Use the call menu

Again, the call menu is an extremely effective tool to use if you want callers to have a great experience when they call you, no matter what phones you’re using to receive calls. You may configure the menu so that callers can choose the number of the option that corresponds to their need, and each menu option can route calls to one phone, or all of your phones if you like.

Create a forwarding schedule for each phone

Using the scheduled forwarding feature lets you set the times, from your online control panel, during which each of your phones will receive calls. For example, if you want to let calls come into your office phone 24/7 but don’t want your home phone to ring during the evening, then you can simply create a forwarding schedule for your home phone that will only allow that phone to ring during daytime hours.

 

3. Multiple Existing Office Phone Lines

The beauty of utilizing a Talkroute virtual phone system for your business is that you don’t need any new phones, or any new equipment whatsoever for the service to work. It will work with the existing phones that you already have, no matter what type of phones they are. So, if your office has a bunch of VoIP desk phones, for example, then you can link them all together in a unified system by simply adding all of them to your Talkroute account as forwarding phone numbers.

Add all your forwarding phone numbers

The first thing you do to get started, whether your office has 10 desk phones or 50 of them, is to add all of them as forwarding numbers to your account from the online control panel. Once they’re all added to your forwarding phone numbers list, you can then set up your system to routes calls to any or all of them in any configuration that you need.

Ring simultaneously or ring in sequence

Although this is not a feature offered by all virtual service providers, a Talkroute system gives you the option to ring all of your phones at the same time when a call comes in, or ring each phone in a specific order. You can easily select whichever setting you need from your control panel.

Phone systems for businesses have come a long way in the past few years. If you’ve never tried a virtual service provider, then you owe it to yourself to check it out because it gives you far more flexibility to organize your system while offering all of the professional features that you get with a traditional provider.