6 Key Features You Need in Your VoIP System

You have to sell your product, handle HR, keep your customers happy, and maintain your records. With all of this on your plate already figuring out a phone system for your growing business can feel like a serious annoyance.

A VoIP phone system is usually the best option, but how do you figure out what features you actually need? To help you out, we put together this guide to the 6 features most commonly required by small and medium-sized businesses.

1. Portable Numbers

Many entrepreneurs start their small businesses using a personal phone or a new cell number. This can be a problem when you start to grow and need to scale up your phone system. If you upgrade your phone you might lose the number all your customers know you by.

Check and see if your new small business phone service provider will port the number for you.

This gives you the best of both worlds. A new more capable phone system and the familiar number you’ve used since the beginning. It also allows all your customers to keep using the number they know.

2. Directory Integrated Caller ID

Every smartphone comes standard with caller ID these days. Make sure your VoIP system provides the same for your business. This provides great benefits for effectively routing calls to the right department or person.

It’s also important that you can build effective communication directories. These allow you to create custom contact lists for decision-makers, individual employees, and any other situation you need.

Another great side effect of this is controlling access to contact data. By centralizing all contact information you can limit who can easily get in touch with your key clients to essential personnel.

3. Mobile Integration and Call Routing Features

Business isn’t just limited to the office. Nowadays you’re as likely to be answering calls on the ride home as you are to do it at the office.

Quality VoIP systems give you the ability to answer calls to a single number wherever you find yourself. Most work through an app or other connection feature and automatically forward calls to your smartphone or computer.

4. Smart Voicemail Systems

Small businesses get a lot of calls. There’s nothing worse than coming into the office and discovering 20 to 30 messages waiting for you.

VoIP systems that allow integration with services like Google Voice make glancing through your messages easily. Instead of having to listen to each one you can browse a list of transcribed messages.

This lets you quickly identify critical messages and file the rest away for later.

5. Effective Customer Service

Even the best small business phone service is going to have downtime and bugs. It’s important that any provider you’re considering have an easy-to-use support system.

Start by checking out their website and navigating to the help or customer support section. Most quality providers will have a list of troubleshooting articles in place. Read a few at random and see if they would be helpful.

Next, you should find out what kind of contact options they offer. If the only way to get support is through a ticket system you might want to look elsewhere. In a truly critical situation, you want to be able to call someone and get an immediate answer.

6. Conferencing Capability

Depending on your business the ability to set up conferences may be critical.

Most small business phone service providers offer conferencing as an add-on feature. This allows you to carry on multiparty calls between you, your employees, and your clients. This works as either an audio or video conferencing setup.

One important thing to remember with a VoIP system is that it requires bandwidth on your network. Video conferencing increases the demand significantly. Make sure you have enough capacity to prevent dropped calls and other signal degradation.

Always Prepare to Scale

One of the biggest benefits of VoIP is the ability to rapidly scale up your service.

This gives you the capability to adjust how many lines you have and what capability is available as needed. This is also of great benefit to seasonal businesses that have varying needs throughout the year.