What is a Virtual Phone System? Features and Guidelines
Want to grow your clients and can’t attend business calls 24/7 and looking for better solutions? Old-fashioned phones no longer meet the demands of the shifting and growing business patterns. Your business needs a flexible phone system.
There come cloud phone systems that are cloud-based and feature-rich. The evolving businesses are widely recognizing the flexibility and potential of the system. Let us tell you everything that your business might need to understand about virtual phone systems.
Virtual Phone System: Let’s get familiar
A virtual phone system is a communication tool rooted through the internet to handle your business’s calls. The cloud business phone system is way different from traditional phone systems. Calls in these systems come via a cloud-based server. Therefore, it doesn’t need brand-new sets of wires and telephones.
You can get the VoIP-based cloud telephony setup for your business and use any internet-enabled device to use it.
The Coveted Features of the System
The cloud telephony provider permits you to take calls directly on any devices with internet connections. If you are not within reach of the office, you can divert the calls on your laptop, desktop, mobile, or even home telephone service. It allows you to redirect the call to a different desktop if you are busy.
If you are unable to attend the calls, you even have solutions for that. Instead of making you do a tiring job of hearing voicemail recording of hours, a cloud phone system will be transcribing your calls and sending them through email.
Some more added leads:
A virtual number is an entry or portal between traditional calls (PSTN) and VoIP.
- A virtual phone system enables remote working
- It has added advantage of using VoIP calling. Hence, long-distance calls with no huge charges
- Auto-attendant
- Busy lamp status(notify co-workers you’re on the phone)
A Feature-rich and Pocket-friendly Option for All kind of Businesses
For the traditional method, you need heavy customization at high costs, in order to get the necessary features of your business. Hence, it means an increase in value. But, the system gives you some of the bewildering features at low cost like;
- Auto attendants
- Professional greeting
- On-hold music for the callers so that they don’t get bored
- No exorbitant rates or cost for international or long-distance calls
- Diverting calls to other departments
- Recording calls for further training purposes of other staff members
- Transcribing and encrypting calls and send them via email
- Staff’s private number doesn’t get public
- All records related to time, duration, date, and person call came from
For any business, it is cheap, scalable, and affordable. Besides, these added features make it even more desirable for businesses of all kinds.
Strengths and Limitations of the Virtual Phone System
Strengths
All the above convenience of the virtual phone system makes it so unique. Let’s view the reasons why business prefers virtual phone system:
- Easy to Configure
Unlike a traditional phone system that needs the toil of an engineer to set up the whole bulk system, it is much more sophisticated. The traditional phone system disrupts the entire structure of the office to get the bulk wires installed. But, in the case of this system, a virtual call provider can do it remotely too.
- Helps in Analyst Gathering and Improvements
Analyzing staff performance is equally essential for the proliferation of business. And keeping a manual track is almost insane. Some data like how is the staff handling his calls, time to resolve an issue, how much duration each call is can be accessed.
Each of these statistics helps you measure team performance, which was otherwise a tough job to do.
- The Flexibility
A virtual phone system works across both types of connections, i.e., cellular as well as VoIP. An internet connection gives your virtual team the liberty to access to any phone calls. These calls are made keeping caller ID, Name, or personal phone number protected and private. Hence, all it takes them any device with an internet connection to communicate, be it any part of the world.
- Easy Call Route and Forwarding
Staff members may be round the globe for the sake of business. How to connect? The toll-free number available is the biggest boon. Your customers can reach up to people they want without any interruptions. Moreover, they need not remember any local number or specific codes for a particular person.
The Cloud telephony provider ensures you with the incoming calls irrespective of your locations and devices. Customers won’t notice any change and, thereby, will get to access like standard phone calls.
- Compatible with Multiple Devices
Your staff can only make calls from phones. The phone is connected from the desk in case of wired phone systems. But, that’s not the scenario for the virtual phone system. The best part is you can synchronize this with your already existing hardware. So, no additional purchase of extra pieces of equipment.
A laptop or tablet, Wireless VoIP headset, smartphones, or Soft phone may choose any of these to install the respective application and meet your needs.
- It makes the Collaboration Easy
Suppose you are unable to attend calls due to some inconvenience. There comes no need to send any voicemail. This system gives you the autonomy and the option to forward that call to a co-worker with availability.
Even you can enhance business conference calls. With a VoIP connection like Avaya IP office phone system, one can easily join into the portal. this is a way to lead a collaborative business approach in communication. So your voicemail won’t get preoccupied, preventing other customers from sending voicemail. If you work as a panel or a team, it will increase the availability of major customers.
Limitations
All these sorted attributes make it so feasible. But, it has limitations as well.
- A cloud-based communication system is highly effective only in the presence of sustained internet connections.
- Need for high productivity equipment like routers and switches
- Occasional mishap related to call quality is latency (network congestion) and jitter (sluggish data pack)
Conclusion
Long gone the days of conventional wired traditional phone calls. With patterns of business shifting, change in the working approach, the cloud-based system is the ultimatum. It has potentially become the cornerstone of business. Hence, every business should unleash and make the optimum use of the benefits of the phone system regardless of its size.