Many Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) don’t perform an adequate needs assessment before they choose a phone system. They may look for the obvious stuff such as voicemail and call routing, but with advances in VoIP technology and cloud-based services, there is a wide range of features such as softphone app for Smartphone integration, teleconferencing, time of day/day of week call routing, auto-attendant, Unified Communications (UC), call reporting etc, that could be invaluable. Assess how your company does business (or how you would like to do business), from the perspective of your customer’s experience and your staff’s productivity and shop accordingly.
Assess whether the bells and whistles come at an extra cost or are included. It is quite often a case of, “It’s the feature we
didn’t know we couldn’t live without.”