Business phone systems
A phone system that follows your people, not your desks.
Once the phone system is software, the handset stops being the point. The same extension rings on a mobile, a laptop or a browser.
- Anywhere Mobile, desktop, browser, handset
- Kept Your existing numbers port across
- One team Phones and the network they run on
What changes
Work from anywhere, without anybody noticing you did.
Four things stop being true the day the phone system moves off a box in a cupboard. All four are the reason people stop thinking about the phones at all.
One call, ringing on every device signed in to the extension at once. Whoever picks it up first gets it, and the person on the other end has no idea whether they reached a desk, a kitchen table or a car park.
- iPhone and Android
- Windows and Mac
- Any browser
- Desk handset
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01
Your extension is in your pocket
The app on a phone, a laptop or a browser rings at the same moment the desk handset does. At home, in the car, at a client site or in another office, it is the same extension and the same number, and nobody on the other end can tell which one you picked up.
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02
Calls route by rules, not by luck
Who rings first, who picks up when they do not answer, what happens after hours, where an unanswered call ends up. All of it is configuration you can change, rather than whoever happens to be sitting nearest a ringing phone.
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03
The handset becomes optional
Keep desk phones where they earn their place, reception, the workshop, a warehouse wall, and skip them where they do not. Most people end up using an app they already have open all day.
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04
A new starter takes minutes
Adding somebody is a licence and a few settings rather than a site visit and a cable. Same for a second site, a seasonal team, or somebody who has moved desks. This is the part that quietly makes the old system expensive.
Choosing a platform
Two sensible answers, and they suit different businesses.
We are not tied to one product, which means the recommendation can depend on you rather than on what we would rather sell. The question that decides it is simple: is the phone how work arrives, or is it one of several ways people reach your staff?
A dedicated phone system
When calls are how the business runs
- Full call handling: menus, queues, hold, overflow and after hours
- Reception views, call recording and reporting built for people who answer phones all day
- Suits bookings, dispatch, reception, support and anywhere a missed call is lost work
Microsoft Teams calling
When the phone is mostly another way to reach staff
- Calling added to the Teams your staff already have open
- One app for chat, meetings and the phone, so there is no second thing to learn
- Fewer moving parts, and it leans on licences you may already be paying for
The part nobody sells you
Call quality is a network problem.
Choosing the platform is the easy half. Whether the calls actually sound right is decided by the firewall, the wifi and the connection underneath them, which is why a phone company on its own can rarely fix it.
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A call is the least forgiving thing on your connection
A download can slow down and a video call can go blurry and recover. A phone call cannot. Voice needs very little bandwidth and almost no patience, so it is the first thing to suffer and the thing everybody notices.
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The usual answer is that it is somebody else
The phone provider says it is the internet. The internet provider says it is the phone system. Both are partly right, neither owns it, and the business in the middle spends a fortnight being transferred between them.
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What actually fixes it
Voice prioritised on the firewall so a large upload cannot flatten a call. Wifi that hands a walking handset between access points without dropping it. Enough headroom on the connection at your busiest hour rather than at 6am when somebody tested it.
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It is the same people either way
The firewall, the switching and the business wifi are already ours to look after, so when a call sounds wrong there is nobody to hand it to. The phone system and the network it runs on are the same job here.
What it does
The things you will actually use.
Every platform has a feature list longer than anybody reads. These are the six that change how a working day goes, and they are set up around how your business answers calls rather than switched on and left at the defaults.
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Menus and call flows
Press one for accounts, and everything behind it: where a call goes at lunch, after hours, on a public holiday, or when the person it wanted is already talking.
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Queues and hold
Callers wait in order with your own hold audio rather than a busy tone, and you can see how long the wait actually is rather than guessing.
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Voicemail to email
Messages arrive in the inbox as audio and often as text, so they get dealt with from wherever somebody is instead of waiting on a flashing light.
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Call recording
Where you need it, with retention decided deliberately rather than left on a default. Recording obligations differ by state, so this gets set up around what applies to you.
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Reporting
Calls answered, calls missed, how long people waited and when the busy hours actually are. Most businesses guess at all four and are wrong about at least two.
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Video and screen sharing
Meetings from the same place as the phone, so there is one less separate subscription and one less app for somebody to be locked out of.
Moving over
The changeover is the bit people dread.
Reasonably so. The phone is the one system a business cannot be down on for an afternoon, so the whole approach is to build the new one beside the old one and switch when it is proven, rather than on the day.
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01
Map what happens now
Which numbers you have, where each one currently lands, and the call flows people rely on without ever having written them down. Nothing is changed until this is on paper and you agree it is right.
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02
Keep your numbers
Existing numbers port across. You keep what is printed on your vehicles, your signage and every invoice you have ever sent, and we handle the paperwork with the carriers.
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03
Build and test alongside the old one
The new system is configured and tested while the old one is still answering calls, so the changeover is a scheduled switch rather than a leap. Cutover is booked out of hours.
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04
Show people how it works
The phone is the one system everybody in the building uses, including the people who avoid every other one. Staff get walked through it rather than emailed a manual, and somebody is reachable on the first morning.
Questions we get asked
Do we keep our existing numbers?
Yes. Numbers port across to the new system, so what is printed on your signage, your vehicles and every invoice you have sent still rings. We handle the paperwork with the carriers and book the cutover out of hours.
What happens to our calls if the internet goes down?
It is planned for rather than hoped about. Calls can fail over to mobiles, to a second connection, or to an answering point of your choosing, and which of those makes sense depends on how much a lost hour of calls costs you. The important part is that it is configured in advance, because the middle of an outage is not when you want to be deciding it.
Do we need to buy new handsets?
Often not many. Plenty of existing IP handsets can be reused, and a lot of businesses end up buying far fewer than they expect once people realise the app on the computer they are already sitting in front of does the same job. Where handsets do earn their place, reception and the workshop, we say so.
A dedicated phone system or Microsoft Teams calling?
It depends on how central the phone is. If calls are how work arrives, bookings, dispatch, reception or support, a dedicated system earns its keep on call handling alone, and the one we deploy is 3CX. If the phone is mostly another way for people to reach your staff and everybody already lives in Teams, adding calling to Teams means one app and one thing to learn. We work out which one you are before recommending either, and we will tell you when the cheaper of the two is the right answer.
Can staff use it from home?
That is most of the point. The same extension rings on a mobile, a laptop and a browser, so somebody working from home, travelling or sitting at a client site is on the same number as they are at their desk, and the caller cannot tell the difference.
Is this part of a managed IT agreement?
No, phones are quoted separately. It is a different service with its own carrier costs and its own hardware, so folding it into a monthly per user figure would hide what you are actually paying for calls. Plenty of our clients have both and get one point of contact for the lot, which is most of the practical benefit, but they are two agreements rather than one.
How is it priced?
On the number of people who need an extension and on what the call handling has to do, quoted before anything starts. It is worth comparing against your current bill in full rather than line by line, because line rental, on site hardware and per site charges tend to disappear rather than shrink, and that is usually where the difference actually is.
Bring your last phone bill.
Thirty minutes, no obligation. We will go through how your calls actually flow today, what your current setup is costing you in full, and which way of doing it suits the way you work.
Or send us a message
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