Choosing the right phone solution for your small business requires considering current needs and future growth. The wrong choice can negatively impact the customer experience and company productivity.

You'll want to avoid paying for features you won't use, but you don't want to skip over essential functions. Here are four tips to help you make the right decision:

Scalability

The best business phone systems are scalable to fit your company's growth potential. You have a system that scales and helps maximize your return on investment. This is especially important for small businesses, which are typically more flexible with their budgets and may experience significant growth quickly.

Scalability refers to the ability of a system to handle a more significant workload without any interruptions in performance. The term is most often used in IT, describing the flexibility of hardware or software to accommodate changing loads.

In addition, small business phone solutions can support more employees or additional locations without costly upgrades and downtime. They can also offer unified communication features, allowing multiple teams to communicate effectively, even remotely. For example, some provide mix-and-match options that let companies add new direct inward dial (DID) and virtual phone numbers to their system as they expand. This allows the company to keep its business number and forward calls to different team members based on the caller's location.

Mobility

As a small business owner, you know your budget is tight and must make every dollar count. Look for a solution that allows you to manage costs and provides a high level of functionality for your needs.

Consider looking for a solution that includes SMS and MMS for unified communications. In a world where consumers send 2.2 trillion text messages yearly, responding quickly and efficiently with real-time texting capabilities is essential.

Many cloud phone providers offer flexible plans that charge by the user, allowing you to add and remove users as your team grows or shrinks. Some also offer customizable, pre-made reporting templates that provide insight into agent performance and customer call flow. And, some features, like allowing your voicemails to be automatically transcribed and pushing those transcriptions to a Slack channel or shared email inbox, come standard with most plans. This feature can save you much time and frustration as a busy small business owner.

Security

The phone solution you choose for your business is one of your most essential investments. It affects everything from your team's ability to connect with customers and clients to the level of customer support you can provide.

Whether you choose an on-premise PBX or a cloud-based VoIP solution, there are plenty of options for managing your small business phone system. On-premise PBX systems require significant upfront investment and maintenance from your IT department, but they allow you to control the hardware and have more security measures in place.

A cloud-based UCaaS solution eliminates the need for on-premise equipment and requires no technical expertise or time from your IT team to set up and maintain. With this solution, you can easily add users and phones, customize features like voicemail transcriptions, and customize how your business appears to callers by customizing greetings and voicemail-to-email. You can also use the same number on your desk and mobile device.

Collaboration

Whether your business speaks to customers and clients on the phone, your team needs a seamless way to work together. Look for a solution that provides collaboration features like voicemail transcription, visual voicemail, shared mobile and desktop lines, group messaging, audio and video conference calls, and even virtual meetings.

A cloud-hosted VoIP phone system is a good option for most small businesses as it doesn't require much upfront investment, and you can quickly scale it as your company grows. These systems usually come with softphone apps that your employees can use on their smartphones or tablets.

If your business has a high call volume, look for a provider with advanced calling capabilities like call monitoring, call whisper, and call barge (call takeover). These functions enable managers to listen in on agent conversations with customers in real-time and provide advice without the customer hearing them. It's also a great way to identify and correct training issues that may slow down your sales or customer service teams.