3 Reasons Your Business Phone System Needs Mobility

Buying a business phone system without mobility features is like buying a car that can only go in reverse: No matter how awesome the rest of the features are, you’re going to be pretty limited in what you can do with it. A business phone system with mobile integration, on the other hand, makes it possible to extend your business’s reach beyond the walls of your office, allowing employees to consistently and productively represent your company and your brand whenever and wherever they need to.

Not sure mobile is really such a big deal? Take a look at these statistics:

• It’s predicted that over 12 billion mobile devices will be in use by 2018.
• In a work setting, 18% of employees use two devices, and 22% use two. But that’s a bit misleading: When you look at the employees who use three or more devices, it tops 56%.
• Approximately 53% of all emails are opened from a mobile device.

Those trends underscore the fact that mobile integration of your business phone system no longer falls into the “bells and whistles” category; it’s a necessary feature. Otherwise, employees and customers alike will skirt your system for the sake of convenience.

But consistency is only one of the benefits. Here are three more important benefits of choosing a phone system with mobile capabilities:

• Constant connectivity: Calling different numbers trying to track someone down is old school. Your customers expect to be able to reach their contacts at your company with one call. A business phone system with mobile integration makes that easy: Customers call one number, and the call is seamlessly sent to the device the employee is currently using—whether they’re using a personal device on the other side of the world, a company-issued cell phone at 11 p.m., or a wireless desktop phone right down the hall. It eliminates both missed calls and the frustration customers feel when they have to work so hard to find someone.
• Productivity: The ability to use a mobile device as an extension of your business phone system makes it possible for employees to work practically anywhere at any time. Rather than being tied to their desks answering calls or juggling two different systems to accomplish what they need to do, they can do it all in one place, with all of the features they’d have if they were sitting at their desk in the office. And there’s no more having to tell customers “I’ll have to take care of that when I get back to the office.” In fact, there’s no need for customers to even know the employee they’re speaking withisn’t in the office: That’s how seamless it is.
• Enterprise-wide ease of communication:Individual productivity is important, but so is team productivity. A business phone system with mobile integration lets employees communicate and collaborate with each other seamlessly, across a variety of devices, without having to maintain separate contact information for each one. And employees can even do things like conference and access or share files from almost any device, all of it done through the business’s central phone system. You’re no longer faced with the dilemma of holding up a decision or making it without a key employee’s input.

When you’re making an important capital investment like buying a business phone system, it’s important to look ahead and choose one that will meet your needs not just today, but tomorrow, next month, and five years from now. That’s a lot to ask from a business phone system without mobile integration.