Every business has the same three blind spots. You’re on another call. You’re out of the office. Or it’s 6 p.m. and the doors are locked. In each case, a caller rings a phone nobody can pick up, hears a generic voicemail, and quite often calls the next business on the list instead.
The fix isn’t working longer hours. It’s setting up your phone system so it knows what to do in each of those moments. A few plain rules, set up once, can make sure every caller lands somewhere useful.
The idea: your phone system should work for you
Older phone systems made people adapt to them. One desk, one phone, one extension, and if you weren’t sitting there, the call went to voicemail. A hosted phone system is different. Your extension is not tied to one desk phone. It is a set of instructions that says where a call should go, in what order, and at what times.
That flexibility is the whole point. A small office in Eagle River, a crew-based contractor in South Anchorage and a busy front desk in Midtown Anchorage all need different rules. The system should fit the way you already work, not the other way around.
When you’re busy: ring more than one phone
The simplest rule is to have more than one phone ring at once. When a call comes in to the main number, it can ring the front desk, the office manager and the owner together. Whoever is free picks up. Nobody has to guess whose turn it is.
If calls regularly stack up, a call queue is the next step. A call queue holds callers in line until someone is free, instead of sending them to voicemail. Callers hear music or a short message about your business while they wait, and the next available person takes the call. Even a five-person office can benefit from one; we cover that in Call queues aren’t just for call centers.
When you’re out: let your extension follow you
This is where most small businesses lose calls. The owner is at a job site in Girdwood, the salesperson is visiting a customer, and the desk phones ring in an empty office.
There are two simple ways to fix this:
- Ring the desk phone and the app at the same time. With the Bria Enterprise app on your cell phone, laptop or tablet, your office extension rings on your desk phone and your app together. Answer wherever you are. When you call back from the app, the customer sees your office caller ID, not your personal cell number.
- Follow-me to a cell phone. If you’d rather not use an app, the system can ring your desk first and then pass the call to your cell phone if you don’t pick up after a few rings. The caller simply hears ringing, not a transfer.
Either way, the caller dialed your business and reached you. That’s all they care about.
When you’re closed: send calls where they belong
After hours, the right answer depends on the business. Some offices are happy with a clear voicemail greeting. Others need an on-call person, or a live answering service that takes messages and handles urgent calls.
A hosted system can change over automatically on a schedule. During business hours, calls ring the office. After hours, on weekends and on holidays, they follow a different path: voicemail, an on-call cell phone, or an answering service. You set the schedule once, and nobody has to remember to flip anything on the way out the door. We compare those three options in After hours: voicemail, a live answering service, or your cell phone?
Make voicemail a last resort, not a dead end
Sometimes a message is unavoidable. When that happens, make sure it gets acted on fast. Voicemail to email sends each message to your inbox as an audio file, so you can hear it on your cell phone within moments and call back, even if you’re nowhere near the office.
A quick call-back often wins the job. A message that sits until Monday often doesn’t.
A simple starting setup
If you’re not sure where to begin, this is a good pattern for most small offices:
- Main number rings two or three people at once during business hours.
- If nobody answers, the call goes to a short queue or to a manager’s cell phone.
- After hours, a schedule sends calls to voicemail or an answering service.
- Every voicemail is emailed to the right person straight away.
From there, you adjust. Busy season in summer might mean a longer queue and more people on it. A quiet winter might mean fewer phones ringing. Because there are no long-term contracts, changing the setup as your business changes is just part of the service.
How IBeXc helps
With IBeXc, you don’t have to work out these rules in a web portal on your own. Our local team in Anchorage designs and programs your call routing for you, based on how your business actually runs. We ask who answers, when, and what should happen when they can’t. Then we build it, test it with you and change it whenever you need.
We’ve been doing this since 2002 on phone system software we design and write ourselves, hosted in a secure Anchorage data center. The same goes for adding a person, a location or a new schedule later on.
Tell us how your calls come in today and where they get lost, and we’ll suggest a setup that catches them. Get a quote for your office →
