5 Signs Your Business Phone System Needs an Upgrade

Here are 5 of the most common signs that you need to update your business phone system.

1. Lack of scalability. As a business owner, your intention is to keep growing your business—not to remain stuck in the same place. Your business phone system should not hold you back in terms of corporate expansion. If your phone system is unable to accommodate the addition of more extensions or users without being too costly to be worth the investment, it is time to make a communications upgrade.
2. Inability to handle call volume. A successful or growing business can expect that its number of both incoming and outgoing phone calls will increase in volume over time. Is your current business phone system equipped to efficiently and economically handle this higher volume of long distance calls being made and received? It’s a wise idea to verify any potential for congestion within your network and to double-check that your have sufficient capacity on your local services (such as local T1 or analog T1s). If it appears that your system will have a problem with keeping up with your communications demands, you need to start searching for a new business phone system.
3. Incompatible with VoIP telephony. Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is the way of the future in terms of business and personal communications. The ability to make voice calls via an Internet network can add up to significant savings in terms of long-distance phone calls between the branches of your company or to non-local clients. This technology can also support cost-efficiency in other arenas when properly implemented. If your current business phone system is not supportive of VoIP telephony, you are missing on the opportunity to enjoy more convenient and less expensive communications.
4. No multi-office support feature. Whether your business already has satellite offices or if you are planning to open other branches and locations in the future, it is imperative that your business phone system is supportive of multiple offices. Adding and managing phone line extensions to remote locations should not be an overwhelming, tedious, or costly task. If your current phone system is not able to treat the management of these extensions as easily as if they were on-site, you should definitely consider updating.
5. Unsupportive of mobile communications. In the modern business, there are a great deal of employees who are not always present within the actual office environment, yet still need to be able to communicate with customers, and with “headquarters.” The majority of these employees (e.g., salespeople, field workers, executives working from home, etc.) will be supplied a cell phone for making calls, but are these mobile devices able to be integrated into your current business phone system? When a customer calls your main business line, are you able to immediately transfer them to your employee’s mobile phone, or do you look unprofessional by having to recite off a cell phone number for the customer to dial themselves? If you can’t work mobile devices into your network, it’s time for a new phone system.

Often times, companies are saving money by upgrading their business phone system service to VoIP technology, resulting in increased efficiencies with new technology and decreased costs by ridding of old service plans. If you’re interested in reviewing your current phone system and plan, contact TTI Houston today. We’ll be happy to give your business a free phone system analysis to see how where you can increase productivity with new technology and decrease costs at the same time.