Hosted PBX system advantages over mobile phones

A hosted PBX system can serve as an economic game changer for an SMB. While many SMBs use mobile phones, many still need desk phones and the features that they come with. This post talks about the five major advantages a hosted PBX system has over a mobile phone.

Place calls on hold

Need to talk briefly with a colleague, look up information, or step away briefly while on a call? Use the mute button on a smartphone. Unfortunately, the other person will hear dead silence. This gets awkward if it lasts more than a minute or so.

A hosted PBX system has a true hold function, most often with music playing. This eliminates an awkward situation, and reduces confusion as sometimes callers mistake dead silence with a hang up. This also enables the option to customize hold music, allowing callers to hear business advertisements or better than elevator music.

A hosted PBX system can transfer calls

With a few employees or less, mobile phones for business will suitably meet communication needs. What happens when a client needs to speak to more than one employee? If the employees are in the same location, speakerphone works. But what if the employees are in different locations?

With Astoundant’s hosted PBX system, that employee could transfer a live call in one of four ways: blind, semi-attended, attended, and direct to voicemail. A blind transfer sends the call to another phone without waiting for it to ring, and before the person at the other end answers. It appears like a direct call to the receiving person.

A semi-attended and attended transfer work basically the same as a blind transfer. To perform a semi-attended transfer, the transferring person waits for the destination extension to ring before hanging up. If the destination person is on the phone, the extension will go directly to a voicemail greeting.

The transferring person can then abort the transfer and resume the call. In an attended, the transferring person waits for the destination person to answer the extension before completing the transfer.

Some companies use the semi-attended, attended, and straight to voicemail methods to screen calls. To transfer a call straight to voicemail, the transferring person dials a (*) before the extension number. The other party will hear the extension’s greeting and will be able to leave a voicemail message.

Park calls

Call parking serves as a more powerful hold feature. Hosted PBX system technology has mostly done away with the analog phone system feature of picking up a call at any extension. A person could place a call on hold on an analog system, and the phone would indicate with a flashing button that lights up on other phones. Pressing the flashing button on another phone picks up the call.

While it’s possible to program this feature into a hosted PBX system, parking calls comes native to most systems. It starts as a call transfer, but the person sends the call to a “parking lot number.” Press the transfer button, dial a code to initiate call park, and the system assigns the call a parking lot number while placing it on hold. To resume the call, dial the parking lot number.

Why do this? It eliminates one drawback to the traditional place a call on hold process. If multiple calls are on hold with multiple buttons flashing, what if a person forgets which button it is? Call parking eliminates the guessing game. On top of that, if the person in the parking lot is forgotten, the hosted PBX system will ring the original extension after a certain time as a reminder.

Caller ID

Many business still rely on their phone number as the primary means of contact. Caller ID allows people to look at the phone number of an incoming call and decide not to answer it if it’s unrecognizable.

Not an issue for a solopreneur, but definitely so for a multiple employee SMB.

Ring Groups

Again, not a solopreneur issue, but what if a group of employees need to answer incoming calls? Mobile phones can’t handle that situation. A multiple employee business may get away with one person answering a mobile phone, but what if multiple calls occur at the same time?

With ring groups, a hosted PBX system can ring several phones at once. If one person is on the phone, it will ring the remaining idle phones.

Every mobile phone has a different number. Unless they’re calling from the company’s published mobile number, a company employee making an outside call will have an unrecognizable number.

Advantage: hosted PBX system

Music on hold, transfer calls, call parking, caller ID, and ring groups. These five features provide powerful functionality to a hosted PBX system, giving it advantages over mobile phones. Bottom line: a growing business will outgrow mobile phones.