If I were to brand the year 2020 so far, the tagline would have to be “Unique problems require unique solutions.” This has proven especially true for small businesses. Small businesses are, of course, always subject to influences outside of their control. Due to the recent pandemic, however, that is true now more than ever.
Businesses are sending employees home in droves, and the ones that are lucky enough to retain their staff have been forced to come up with new systems for managing teams remotely.
Luckily, technology has been working towards enabling remote work and communication for years. In fact, tele-commuting already saw a 115% increase from 2005 to 2017. In addition, a 2012 Stanford Business study concluded that many people who have the ability to work from home are actually happier and more productive, resulting in higher retention rates for the company.
Remote work is certainly not the worst thing for your business, as long as you have the right tools. If you have been looking for a remote phone solution, then a hosted PBX service can be your answer. In this article, we will examine and define hosted PBX, as well as outline all the ways it could contribute to the remote productivity of your small business.
Hosted PBX Service: Your Small Business’ Remote Phone Solution for 2020
What is a hosted PBX service?
PBX stands for “Private Branch Exchange” and is a private phone system to link all of the telephone lines of your small business together.
Older iterations of this technology required the business to have clunky equipment in the office that would connect all their phone lines to a traditional phone provider. One of the major difficulties of this phone system, aside from maintenance costs and service downtime, was that it limited the potential for growth. If you had aspirations of growing your small business into a big business, you would choose between one of two things: purchasing more equipment in anticipation of company growth or rolling the dice and purchasing for your current need. The big challenge with the second option, however, was that upgrading your PBX system to add more phone lines would be complicated and costly.
Today, however, hosted PBX services store your phone system in the cloud, and calls are made over the internet, not through telephone providers. That means as long as your office phones are digitally enabled, there is no need to purchase additional equipment and the potential for growth is unlimited. Thank you, internet!
Okay, now that we have a basic understanding of what a PBX phone system is and how a hosted PBX service can provide it, you might be wondering:
How will a PBX service help your team work remotely?
- Forward PBX calls to your cell phone.
The first thing you will want to do if you plan to work remotely is forward all PBX calls to your cell phone; the same goes for the phones of your employees. This feature is not available through on-site PBX systems, so you will definitely need to be using a hosted system!
You can forward your office phone to your cell phone or to another employee’s cell phone, depending on your need. Unfortunately, in today’s world, we also have to be prepared for employee illness more than ever before. Make sure you have a plan in place to be sure that customers will not fall by the wayside! If in the event that a salesperson is sick, for example, you can forward their extension to another employee while he/she is recovering.
Many hosted PBX services will also give you the option to differentiate between PBX calls and cell phone calls. Let’s face it: your greetings are probably pretty different in those two cases. You probably do not speak to customers or employees in the same casual manner that you speak to family and friends. If your small business prides itself on its professionalism, you want to make sure you are providing that at every interaction with your customers, and this PBX feature will help you do that, even from home.
- Use your cell phone to send outbound calls from your business number.
Through the use of a hosted PBX service, employees can make business calls from their cell phone- without distributing personal numbers to clients and/or customers.
With the available automation features of your PBX service, you can dial your office number, and the “auto attendant” will give you options for what type of action you wish to take. You will select “place an outbound call” and dial the number you wish to call. The recipient’s caller ID will display your business number, not your personal cell phone.
Protect the personal privacy of staff and the professional reputation of your business using this ‘outbound calls’ feature through your hosted PBX system.
- Remote conference calls
One of the biggest difficulties of working remotely is the inability to call meetings with multiple employees. Obviously, not all of your business communication is done one-on-one in the office because it’s inefficient. It wouldn’t make sense to inform five employees of the same information five separate times, right?
With a PBX service, it is possible to hold conference calls (aka 2020’s version of a conference room meeting) while working remotely.
One advantage of this remote working system is that your small business will be able to hire employees from all over the country! If your business is based in New York, for example, but your ideal candidate lives in California, that person can still be an active and included member of your team!
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With a hosted PBX service, your small business will be more than ready to meet the challenges of today’s environment with a seamless remote workforce. Customers can continue to interact with your business much like before while you work from the comfort of your own home! Or the park or the beach or your backyard… The point is: your business can go anywhere you do with a hosted PBX service!
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