Phone systems are easy to ignore. They sit in a cupboard, they mostly work, and nobody wants to open that particular can of worms. The trouble is that an ageing system does not fail all at once – it leaks customers slowly, one missed call at a time.
Here are the five signs we see most often when a business is overdue for a change.
1. Calls drop out, or callers get a busy signal
If customers are telling you they "couldn't get through", believe them. Older on-premise systems have a fixed number of lines. Once those lines are in use, the next caller gets an engaged tone – and most people do not ring back, they ring the next business on the list.
Crackling, echo and calls dropping mid-conversation usually point at ageing copper lines or hardware at the end of its life. Both are fixable, but not by rebooting the box again.
2. Nothing works when staff are out of the office
If your team can only make and take work calls while sitting at a desk, you are running a system designed for a different decade. Trades on site, a manager doing a supplier run, someone working from home for the school holidays – they all need to answer the business number and have their calls logged, not hand out their personal mobile.
A modern system puts your office extension on a mobile app. Same number, same voicemail, same transfer buttons, whether the person is at their desk or in the ute.
3. Maintenance costs keep climbing
Old handsets and cards get harder to source every year. When a technician quotes you several hundred dollars to replace a single desk phone from a discontinued range, that is the system telling you something. Add up the last two years of call-out fees, line rental and maintenance contracts and compare it with a monthly per-user cloud plan – the comparison is usually uncomfortable.
4. No voicemail-to-email, no call reporting
Voicemail that only exists as a flashing light on one handset is a message that will not get returned. Voicemail-to-email sends the recording and a transcript to whoever needs it, so a message left at 6pm Friday is not sitting there until Tuesday.
The same goes for reporting. If you cannot answer "how many calls did we miss last month, and at what time of day?", you cannot make a decision about rostering, or about whether an after-hours service is worth it. Modern systems give you that as standard.
5. Adding a person is a project
On an old system, a new staff member means a technician visit, possibly a new card in the cabinet, and a bill. That is a poor fit for a business that hires seasonally or opens a second site. On a cloud system, adding a user is a few minutes of admin and a handset in the post – and removing one is just as easy.
What a modern system actually is
Cloud phone systems (often called VoIP or hosted PBX) carry your calls over your internet connection instead of a physical phone line. The "system" lives in a data centre rather than a cupboard, which is why there is no hardware to maintain, no capacity limit to run into, and no site visit needed to change how calls are routed.
In day-to-day use it feels the same as what you have now – a handset on the desk, hold, transfer, extensions – with the extras that make the difference: mobile apps, voicemail-to-email, hunt groups, after-hours messages, hold messaging, and reporting you can actually read.
The two things people worry about are internet reliability and losing their number. Both are manageable. A business-grade connection with the right setup handles voice comfortably, and calls can automatically fail over to mobiles if the internet does drop out. As for the number, it comes with you.
Making the switch
Bold Media Group handles the whole change, including porting your existing numbers so the number on your signage, your vehicles and your Google listing keeps working. We look at how calls come in now, set the system up to match, deliver and configure the handsets, and stay on the phone with your team on cutover day.
Most small business changeovers are done inside a couple of weeks, and staff pick the handsets up in about ten minutes.
If two or three of the five signs above sound familiar, it is worth a conversation. Get in touch and we will look at your current setup and bills, and tell you plainly whether it is worth changing yet.