Adventures in Learning about Phone Features

In everything telecom, including phone features, our industry has the biggest weakness for jargon. When it comes to the actual functionality we need to understand in order to know if we can benefit from it, well that can be both challenging and time consuming.

Fancy marketing hype about business phone systems - (we're all guilty but I'll still roll my eyes) - techie terms and mysterious acronyms will make you dizzy. Plus the manufacturers will sometimes give the same function its own unique (and different) name than might be commonly recognized.

So if you're trying to compare phone features across different systems, such as paging, or music on hold, or you want to know about the latest and greatest (unified messaging anyone?), we will try to help.

Sometimes my customers will tell me that they don't need to update their telephone system because they don't use half the calling features already available to them. That may be true, but there are telephone features we rely on every day in business, and we're not even aware that we're using them.

For instance, telephone companies provide small businesses with several lines that are tied to the business's main published number. Some people call this a 'rotary', or a 'hunt group', or 'hunting lines'. This is because if the first line is busy, a second incoming call will hunt for the next open line. Well that's pretty standard, right? Apparently not. It seems that some of the 'digital' telephone and ITSP's (oops - stands for Internet Telephony Service Provider) don't do this in the customary way.

Picture this: you call someone from your business AND you make that call on a line that isn't the primary number for your business, AND the person you're calling isn't available to answer their phone. . . they may see the missed call, note your caller ID and call you back at that number, a number that isn't your published number. No problem. Usually. But what we've seen is that with certain providers' service, you might or might not get that call back.

In that case, if that specific line is in use at the time the caller attempts to reach you at that number - they'll receive a busy signal because the provider hasn't yet figured out how to make calls to numbers other than your main number hunt for another call path into your system.

I know that was a bit much by way of example, but can you see how getting an understanding of the most basic, as well as advanced phone features available could help your business improve the way you do business?

In fact, 'power users' are really few and far between. And what if you could identify some useful phone system features you already have available on what you already own, but you're not completely clear about what to ask for or how to ask for it?

Elsewhere on this site, we may state clearly that a section or topic is in no way intended to be exhaustive. (That would literally be exhausting.) But here, we will strive to include every relevant, useful, cutting edge phone feature you ever wanted to know more about - whether or not you were afraid to ask!