Update your communications – making your mobile phone work with your office phone system

It’s a given that communications are much more mobile these days even for the small business owner. By working with your telecom provider you can be a lot more productive and be a lot more accessible by your customers. Advanced communications such as simultaneous ring and mobile SIP clients (mobile phone apps that run on your smartphone) can tie together your office phone system and your mobile phone to make communicating with your customers or trading partners much more seamless.

Right now you probably have a standalone phone system at your office that consists of desk phones and a box that hangs on the wall in some closet in your office. These have been built to provide an efficient use of your land lines (i.e., you don’t have to have a separate phone line for each phone). As communications moves more mobile wouldn’t it be nice if your mobile phone acted as a part of your office system. There are several ways you can do this with some being more seamless than others.

The first way would be to setup your office system to forward your calls to your mobile phone if you weren’t in the office. This is fairly simple with most phone systems but you may have to call your office phone system vendor to get the right instructions. With some systems you can set this up for certain times of day such as just office hours. After five o’clock you may want your business calls to go to voicemail.

The second way is to use a feature that many telecom providers have called Simultaneous Ring. In effect when you get an incoming call it rings both your office phone and your mobile phone at the same time. The first one to answer gets the connection and you can receive caller ID on either phone. This feature requires that your phone system can handle DID or Direct Inward Dial numbers. This phone system feature allows every phone to have their own phone number and that phone can be directly dialed from outside the business. So check with your office system vendor and your telecom provider to see if you can do this.

The third way is to have a mobile application called a SIP client that works with your phone system and looks just like an extension to the phone system. Your office phone system would have to support this but you would have the same functionality as if you were sitting in your office. You can put the caller on hold, transfer the call, and even use the intercom function if you desire.

In the future communications will act more seamlessly without having to use the tricks above but for right now you can do some pretty good stuff!

Newroads Telecom is Fort Smith, Arkansas Telephone and Internet Provider, Visit us for Maximum performance at the lowest cost! http://www.newroadstelecom.com