| Did you have a landline phone growing up? As a teen, it was so agonizing to camp out by the phone for that special someone to call. Tomorrow is Landline Telephone Day and I do miss the days of the phone knowing its place and not being attached to my hip. Do you feel the same? This week, I’ll share a story involving romance from my teenage years and offer some information on cloud phone systems for businesses. Glad to have you along, this will be a fun one!
Let’s kick things off by taking you to the early 90s when our phone at home looked exactly like this. While quite puzzling to my parents, as a 13 year old, I was an incurable romantic. I would listen to cassettes filled with sad love songs, write poetry, and butcher onions to produce teary eyes so I could snap sad pictures of myself with our 35mm Kodak camera. I was willing to go any distance necessary to prove to our next door neighbor’s daughter how madly I was in love with her. Our bedrooms shared a brick wall, so I developed a knock system. Three knocks spaced out in a unique way meant she would answer if I called. Talking to her on the house phone without anyone’s knowledge felt naughty and exhilarating. Life was great until she got permission to date a boy and chose someone else. My heart was broken and I no longer needed onions to have teary eyes, but I did get much better at writing poetry. One day, very late at night, I had the handset sandwiched between my head and shoulder for close to an hour before going live on radio to read one of my poems. I got yelled at for being up late on a school night and my neck was cramping, but it was all worth it as I was awarded a pair of sandals for winning the poetry contest.
As the famous song goes “Those were the days, my friend. We thought they’d never end.” Fast forward to today, and phones are much less magical in comparison but even more necessary for businesses. So let me give you some practical reasons why your business could benefit from a cloud phone system:
- Cloud phone system provide each team member with a direct dial number. Using a smartphone app, team members can place calls and send SMS messages using this number. This helps you have control over phone numbers your team uses to communicate with your clients as well as guard their privacy.
- Your main business number can easily be configured online to handle incoming calls anyway you like. You can answer callers with a menu of options or direct them to specific people in a desired order. Cloud phone systems work great for remote workforces.
- Voicemails can be transcribed and sent to you via email. This makes replying to them quick and they can also be forwarded to another team member when necessary.
- Most cloud phone providers do not actually require physical desk phones. Your team can be setup simply using a smartphone app where they can access all necessary features such as call transfers, holds, change of voicemail greetings, and more.
- All your phone system settings would be easily accessible on a website and some can be configured in advance. You are closed on certain holidays? You don’t like to take calls during certain hours of the day? Specific callers should always be sent to a particular team member? Advanced settings are easily self-managed.
- Having a business phone system provides callers with confidence in working with you. In the past, such systems required expensive hardware and labor intensive configuration. That is longer the case. Cloud technology combined with smartphone apps grants any business at any budget access to business phone systems.
I would be happy to consult with you on a business cloud phone system or share more of my landline phone stories anytime. I appreciate all the communication tools that help us stay in touch, especially those that are designed to waste less of our precious time. You may not have a landline at home, but for a moment imagine you do: pick a place where it would be located in your house, and leave your cellphone there until you must use it again. Nothing beats sharing, connecting, and living in the moment. May you have lots of chances to truly connect and collect such memories.
Will have a special knock on your mailbox next week, so be on the lookout until then.
– Burak Sarac, Team Lead
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