I have a small business that is growing rapidly- I hope to double my payroll
this year. My need for comprehensive business services is going to grow even
faster than my staff. We are a technical company that offers services over the
phone, as well as personal service right to our client’s locations. That means
we need to be able to receive calls, transfer them to our reps in the field, and
have them be able to transfer calls right back to the office all on the same
phone system. Up until now, we have been using a plan from a business cell phone
company, but as we grow, we are going to need a service to handle our own PBX.
That’s a private branch exchange- basically our own internal business phone
service. The days of ‘family plan,’ style business phone services are
(thankfully) behind us.
We are going to be moving into a multi- floor office building, so we will
need a service that can provide my people with business phone lines at their
desks, but also with cell phones that are part of the same system. I need to be
able to monitor and record calls, direct clients to the right place with a
short, simple automated system, and even make automated message calls to clients
at their request. Basically, I’m pretty sure we need everything a business phone service
could offer. I need one that does it all- but don’t let that fool you; we’re
still a small business with only about one hundred regular clients.
I have been looking into enterprise business services for business cell phones, and it is a
complicated world. There are a lot of companies that make bold, vague promises
about ‘providing solutions,’ ‘business services,’ etc. There’s lots of smug,
high-brow language that does not say very much. I won’t know if a company can
help me, and for how much, until I actually tell them what I need. We are in a
precarious position- needing a lot of different services but still being
relatively small, so I want to avoid the big companies. I don’t want to get
locked into a service that has an attractive introductory deal and then held in
by a complicated contract. I want a company that just handles business phones. I
want a small, dedicated company like mine to handle our phone system for
life.