It is common in modern homes these days to find that there isn’t a physical phone installed. Rather, people are opting to rely solely on their mobile phone. However, should the same be the case in businesses? Is it time do away with the desk telephone?
There are of course advantages for retaining the physical phone in the workplace but this will depend largely on the nature of the business itself. In some organisations, the entire working day may be spent at a desk without any requirement for staff to be contactable outside normal hours, so a landline phone makes sense.
Take another company, where employees spend a lot of time away from the office and are spread over several locations, and the challenge is to keep them connected.
Relying solely on a desk phone will render this impossible.
Tempting as it is to think the best answer is to switch entirely to mobile, there are much more suitable solutions that provide fully-integrated communications that improve not only operational efficiency but vastly enhance the customer experience.
Utilising advances in technology coupled with the internet can allow organisations to manage all their communications as a single unit, rather than an array of phones and other devices.
Using a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) system, business users can use any device under their control, be it a mobile, tablet or laptop, to make a call as if they were using their desk phone.
They can also choose to do so using a single telephone number. We are already used to sending an email from a single address but from a variety of devices – now we can do the same with a phone number.
There are significant pros for inbound calls also. Rather than clients having to ask themselves how best to make contact, they can instead be provided with a single phone number which may at first connect with your desk phone, then if unanswered divert to your mobile and then if still unanswered, cascade to a colleague that can deal with the query.
The possibilities are virtually endless and can be configured in a manner that best suits the needs of your business and its customers – with or without a desk phone.