Can Your Phone System Do This?

It’s easy to look at your business phone system and think to yourself, “Well, the old girl is doing the best that she can,” as if it’s a beloved senior work horse with arthritis. We’ve mentioned this in a previous blog about how Otsego county businesses have been left in the dust with these older phone systems, so most business owners have no idea that they have been missing out on a ton of really great innovations.

In this post, we’re going to talk about some of the more advanced integrations that a cloud-based phone system can bring.

A Quick Recap About Modern Phone Systems

Just to catch you up, modern cloud-based phone systems are a huge game changer, especially compared to the “traditional” phone systems that most organizations in our area have been stuck using for the last few decades. We cover this more in the other article, but the gist is that Otsego county, in general, has been slow to adopt modern phone systems, to no fault of the business owners. Up until very recently, phone providers just haven’t made hosted VoIP a clear option for organizations to upgrade to.

These hosted VoIP solutions offer a massive array of features, where older systems tend to nickel and dime you for the basics—features like call forwarding, parking, auto attendants, and more are simply always included with most VoIP solutions, and in a lot of cases, VoIP can be cheaper in comparison to the more traditional options.

It doesn’t stop there though, which is what we want to talk to you about today. Modern cloud-hosted VoIP solutions, like the one we offer, offer some great integrations that can help automate and streamline your operations.

Microsoft 365 VoIP Integration

Microsoft 365 Contact Syncing
Many businesses store their contacts in Microsoft 365, throughout Outlook and other Microsoft apps. When your phone system can sync your contacts over, your staff won’t need to dig into their Outlook to find phone numbers and extensions—it’s all right there, on whatever device they are dialing from.

This also means that your caller ID is more accurate, and you can track calls and easily review communication points between your staff and any particular contact.

Sync Statuses from Your Outlook Calendar
When a user has an event that sets them out of the office, your phone system can set them as “Away” or “Do Not Disturb.” On top of that, you can set up automatic forwarding profiles for when certain staff aren’t available, so phone calls get forwarded to another person or to a cell phone

Make Calls from Microsoft 365.
If you are looking at a contact in Outlook or from another application in Microsoft 365, you can easily launch a call by simply clicking on the contact. It’s as easy as that!

Microsoft Teams Integration

We love Microsoft Teams for a lot of reasons, but there is always room for improvement. By integrating Microsoft Teams with your phone system, you can eliminate those expensive domestic and international calling plans from Microsoft Teams, and use any IP-based phone as your audio device in Teams conference calls. You can set your hosted phone system to govern all of your Teams meetings, or just use your phone to kick off a quick conference call on the fly.

Even More Integrations

It doesn’t stop there. We can help clients integrate tons of other applications with our hosted VoIP solution, including Microsoft Dynamics, Zendesk, Zoho, and a whole lot more!

Let’s Save Your Organization Money and Get You a Better Phone System

You don’t have to feel like your current phone solution belongs in a museum. Switching over to our hosted VoIP solution is painless, and will likely save you a lot of money. Best of all, it’s easy to add new users as needed, while delivering some truly amazing features without costing extra.

Want to check it out? Give us a call at 607.433.2200 for a demonstration and a quote.