VoIP Toolkit

The top five advanced VoIP features your small business needs

Tags:
Conferencing,
Convergence,
Unified Messaging,
VoIP

Deb Shinder Tech Republic

Published: 03 Apr 2007 14:39 BST

You're familiar with the cost and convenience benefits of using VoIP technology for your small business' telephone needs, either instead of or in conjunction with traditional PSTN phone lines. But once you've decided to take the plunge, you still have more decisions to make.

Before settling on a VoIP provider, PBX, and/or IP phone systems, you need to think about the feature set that you need. If your business is small, you might think all you need are basic features such as call forwarding, voice mail, three-way calling, etc.

However, small businesses can benefit from some of the more advanced available feature sets in unique ways. In fact, the right set of features can make your small business look much bigger in the eyes of your customers (and potential customers), partners, vendors, and others with whom you do business over the phone.

Let's explore some of the sophisticated VoIP features that can make a small business appear to be a larger, highly professional organisation. Here are the top five features I would look for.

Auto attendant
An extension of voice mail, auto attendant is a basic feature of high-end IP phone systems and IP PBX units. For example, the Auto Attendant feature in the popular Asterisk open source IP PBX lets you play music or prerecorded messages to customers on hold, and it uses a voice mail "tree" that supports directories by department, employee, or extension.

In addition, auto attendant software can answer incoming calls to a central number and route those calls based on the caller's need. For example, the caller can choose to route the call to the sales department, billing department, accounts receivable, etc. In a small organisation, one person or department may perform all of these functions, and the call may end up at the same extension for multiple choices — but callers don't know that, and your organisation appears to have more employees than it really does.

Find Me, Follow Me
Another popular feature is Find Me, Follow Me (FMFM). This feature allows employees to move around, either within the organisation or outside it, and still receive calls as if they're sitting at their desks. Workers telecommuting from home, executives in hotel rooms on the road, technicians out on a job site — they can all get their calls no matter where they are.

You can configure the system so that when a call comes in for an employee, the desk phone rings first, then the employee's mobile phone, then his or her home phone, until the system finds the employee. Or the employee can use the Follow Me functionality to define the phone number of the location where he or she will be and have all calls routed there.

With this feature, employees have more flexibility, and customers are less likely to end up talking to voice mail instead of the person they're trying to call. Different vendors may use different terms for FMFM, including call hunting or advanced forwarding.

Presence
This is an extension of the FMFM functionality. Rather than passively depending on users to set up locations where they expect to be, the Presence feature can actually track them down. For example, the system can detect that a user logged onto his or her email account from a computer in the accounting department or checked voice mail messages from a phone at the reception area, and it can then extrapolate from that where the user is.

A presence system also allows you to create rules about how to handle calls based on the user's location. For example, you can...