It’s generally understood that one of the first things you need to do when setting up a business is to establish communication channels which allow you to communicate with customers and colleagues alike. And, despite the fact that there are many other means of communicating with each other today, the most important one still happens to be telephony. You can have as many email accounts and messenger handles as you want but, at the end of the day, people will still trust you more if you have a phone number that they can call.


Of course, it’s also a well-known fact that simply having phone service isn’t enough for a business to operate as well as it could communication-wise. Many a rookie businessman has made the mistake of using a private number for a business number, to disastrous results. This is because companies have to field more incoming calls than a normal person, and private phone systems don’t have the capacity to manage all those calls.

Business phone systems typically have call management features that are specifically designed to help you stay productive without missing out on important calls. According to a RingCentral blog entry, the best call management features you can have are as follows:

Answering Rules

Answering rules help you establish what happens to a call after it is picked up by your business phone system. Nowadays, with the truly advanced phone systems (most of them cloud-based), you can use an online dashboard to indicate call handling based on the time of day, the day itself, and even the identity of the caller. For example, you can set up your rules so that all calls made over the weekend are sent to your voicemail, while calls made by important contacts after business hours are sent to either you or a trusted employee’s extension. With this, you can field calls more efficiently.

Call Screening

Another means of ensuring that calls are managed as effectively as possible is to screen your calls. This is made possible through the Caller ID, which allows you to determine whether or not you can pick up a call now, send it to voicemail, or block it. In some cases, you can even identify an unlisted number by requiring the caller to state his identity and have a caller wait for you to finish a minor task before you pick up a call.

Call Logs

Call logs help you keep track of all the incoming and outgoing calls and faxes that go through your phone system. What that means is that you can always go back and make sure that every piece of phone communication you get has been responded to or handled appropriately.

Advanced Call Forwarding

Call forwarding usually just means that you have the system forward specific calls to the appropriate extensions. With advanced call forwarding, you can forward any call to pretty much any phone device you have attached to a specific business phone system extension – including home landlines and smartphones. This means you can handle calls anytime, anywhere.

Mobile Apps

Speaking of being able to answer business calls on your personal smartphone, you now also have the option to handle your business calls using this device, with the help of a specialized caller ID and VoIP, WiFi and 3G capabilities.

Other RingCentral tips reveal how other modern phone features can be used to the advantage of your business.

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