For most companies, the one thing that is most important item in their offices is telephone. Phones are nowadays the most used means of communication. They have largely reduced the time and cost of passing information from one person to another. Business telephone systems usually are not costly but their prices or cost will increase with any additional feature in the system.

When looking for business telephone, there basically three critical questions one needs to ask themselves. First answer the question of what type of phone you organization requires. Evaluate whether your enterprise requires full fledged phone structure that generally includes physical phones or the organization can survive with virtual phone service. Virtual phone service use cellphones rather than the traditional office phones.

Auto attendant is the first feature which generally acts as automatic receptionist. It basically takes receptionist place by presenting a list of options to callers. It can even allow callers dial party extension directly. The other feature is conferencing feature which is a feature that offers several extensions to link together enabling callers calling from different places to have a conversation.

If you decide to acquire the VoIP one will have to decide whether they want the VoIP housed at their company premises or probably have the system hosted in cloud. Below are types of phones available today in the market. There is virtual phone service, VoIP, landlines, cloud based VoIP and self hosted VoIP. Below is the explanation of how these phones work.

Automated directory will definitely allow users to search for a staff extension by dialing the first letters of that employee name. These telephones also have voice mail which stores messages in case the employee is not available to take the call. The next important feature is call hold. This is basically the potential to put on hold a call while the employee is on another line attending to other clients.

Call forwarding can also be very important feature to consider having in your phone system. This provides the user or employee with the power to divert call to other lines or extensions. There is speed dial which save time as the phone automatically redials itself. Paging is an important feature that enables employees to communicate over public address facility to easily locate any staff or sometimes used to give announcements.

It also provides workers who work from remote places or locations variety of phone features that are not available or not provide for by home phones and also cellphones. The disadvantage of this telephone structure is that it is not yet fully fledged.

But these advanced features will raise the cost of the system making it not ideal for small companies. Such features include remote location characteristic which simply allow connections to offsite small or employee remote offices through internal extension dialing. The other advanced features include follow me or find me and CTI.

The system requires small or little capital to acquire and install making it very affordable to small businesses. The telephone can easily be operated by a person with little technical expertise. The phone has been found to be ideal for businesses with workers who work from remote locations. It is the phone also recommended for sole proprietors since they do not have a lot of capital to invest in larger phone structures.