When the old phone system is holding you back
Office phones get replaced last. They sit in a closet, they mostly work, and nobody wants to touch them. Then something small breaks and you find out how stuck you are.
These are the usual signs.
- The phone box on the wall is older than some of your staff, and the only person who knew how to program it retired.
- Callers get a busy signal or ring forever when two lines are in use.
- Calls after closing go nowhere, or to a voicemail nobody checks until morning.
- People working from home give out their personal cell numbers, and customers keep calling those numbers long after.
- Adding one phone for a new hire means a service visit and new wiring.
- You're opening a second location, or moving, and the phone company says your number can't come along.
- Nobody can tell you how many calls were missed last week.
Hosted VoIP in plain terms
VoIP means your calls travel over your internet connection and not over separate phone company wires. Hosted means the equipment that used to hang in your closet, the box that decided which phone rings, now runs in a provider's data center. You have phones on desks, an internet connection, and a web page where the settings live. That's the whole system.
Because the brains aren't in your building anymore, your extension isn't tied to a jack in the wall. It follows you.
One number, three places to answer
When someone dials your extension, it can ring the phone on your desk, an app on your laptop and an app on your cell phone, all at once. Pick up whichever is closest. The caller sees and hears the office either way.
It works the other direction too. Call a customer from the app on your cell and they see the business number, not your personal one. For anyone who splits time between the office, home and the road, that single feature is usually the reason to switch.
An auto-attendant that doesn't annoy people
The auto-attendant is the recorded greeting that answers and offers choices: press one for scheduling, two for billing. Done well, it gets callers to the right person without anyone playing receptionist. Done badly, it's a maze.
We keep menus short, a handful of options and one level deep where we can. We always leave a way to reach a person. We set different handling for open hours, closed hours and holidays, so a caller at night hears something useful and not endless ringing. And we build ring groups, so "press one for scheduling" rings every phone at the front desk together or in order, however you want it.
Voicemail to email
A message left on your extension shows up in your inbox as an audio file, often with a rough written transcript. You can listen from anywhere, forward it to the person who should handle it, and keep it as a record. A general mailbox can deliver to a shared address, so the whole front desk sees it. If you don't have a shared address yet, our Microsoft 365 and email page explains how those work.
Keeping your existing numbers
You can almost always keep your numbers. Moving them from the old carrier to the new one is called porting, and it's a paperwork process between the two carriers. We collect a recent bill, confirm the account details match exactly, and file the request. The old carrier controls how fast it goes, not us and not you.
One rule matters more than any other: don't cancel the old service yourself. The number has to be active to move. Once the port completes, the old line closes without anyone calling to cancel. Cancel early and you can lose a number you've had on your trucks and business cards for decades.
What we do, step by step
- List every line and what it does. Main number, direct lines, the fax, the toll-free number if you have one. We also find the lines that aren't for talking: alarm panels, elevator phones, gate and door entry, and some older card terminals. Those may need to stay on a traditional line, and it's better to know before anything is ported.
- Test the network. Voice is picky. A connection that streams video happily can still chop up a call. We check the internet line, the cabling and the switches, and fix what would hurt calls first. The details are on our network and Wi-Fi page.
- Map the call flow. We sit down with whoever answers the phones and draw what happens to a call: who rings first, what happens if nobody picks up, what happens at lunch, at night, on a holiday.
- Build and test before the switch. Phones, greetings, extensions and mailboxes get set up and tested on a temporary number while your old system keeps taking calls.
- Port the numbers. On port day, calls start arriving on the new system. We're watching when it happens.
- Train and adjust. Transfer, park, conference, change your greeting. Then we come back to the call flow after you've lived with it, because the first version is never quite right.
The parts people don't mention
Hosted phones depend on two things your old system didn't: power to the network gear and a working internet connection. If either one drops, desk phones go quiet. Callers aren't stranded, because the system itself is still running elsewhere, and it can send calls to the cell phone apps or forward to another number by rule. We set that rule up on day one. A battery backup on the modem, firewall and switch covers short outages.
Emergency calls work differently too. An internet phone doesn't know where it is, so each phone gets a registered street address that emergency dispatchers see. We register the office address at setup. If someone takes a desk phone home, that address has to be updated, and we show you where to do it.
Faxing over VoIP is unreliable. If you still fax, an online fax service that delivers pages to email is the usual answer, and you can generally keep the fax number.
When you don't need a phone system
A one-person business that answers every call on a cell phone doesn't need desk phones, an auto-attendant or us. If the only goal is to keep your personal number private, a second-line app on the phone you already carry does that for very little effort.
Two or three people who all sit in one room and already have working phones may not gain much either. If the only thing bothering you is calls going unanswered after closing, a forwarding rule or a better greeting on the current system might be the whole fix. Ask us and we'll look at that first.
A hosted system starts to pay for its trouble when calls need to reach more than one person, when people work from more than one place, when you have a front desk that's overloaded, or when the old equipment can't be repaired anymore. For offices that would like the phones, computers and network looked after together, see managed IT. If you're starting from scratch in a new office, our small business IT support page covers everything else that goes in with the phones.