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When people think about business phone solutions they generally think about “sales calls” or “support calls”. They often forget a big part of their startup life: all the calls between teammates, with investors, business partners, incubators, journalists, etc.

Your phone is not only an interface between your startup and your customers/leads but also between your startup and all the other humans out there (yes there are real humans behind these computer screens).

Using your smartphone with your personal account to handle these calls works fine but you can really boost your team productivity and improve your team workflow by adopting a good business phone system for you and all your teammates. Here’s what you can do with our product for example.

1. Shared contacts

As we’ve explained, the life of a startuper is made of many interactions with many different types of people: investors, business partners, journalists, incubators, bankers, accountants…  You generally end up with a big mess when it comes to your contact phonebook.

Having a unique phonebook shared with all teammates is a real-time and productivity saver:

• everybody has access to all important pro contacts. You don’t need to ask your teammate to send you the accountant number for the 10th time.

• everybody gets the updates. When a contact's information is updated you are sure that everybody will have it.

• keep it synchronized with all your other contact management tools (Gmail, iCloud, etc.). Forget about duplicates.

2. Availability status

Availability status is now part of our daily life at work. We know that we shouldn’t interrupt a teammate when its chat status on Gtalk, Hipchat (or else) is red.

Why shouldn’t it be the case with our phone numbers? Having the possibility to set up our availability status directly for our phone number can make a huge difference:

• Before entering a meeting, just turn off all your business numbers.

• You can set up automatic redirections. For example: You are waiting for a call from your investor. If it happens when you are not available, you can simply specify that it should be redirected to your co-founder.

An availability status directly tied to your phone number simplifies your life. Even more so if you link it to your Gtalk or Hipchat status.

3. Collaboration

By sharing a company phonebook and call history you add another layer of collaboration on top of your phone system:

• share notes and comment on specific calls or contacts between teammates

• share new contact information with your team

• quickly get up to date with all recent calls. The time when you had to ask a teammate if he could contact back a customer and how it went is gone. Just check your call history and the note he wrote.

4. Onboard / offboard employees

Onboarding a new employee or offboarding a leaving one can be a real pain. A startup-friendly business phone solution will save you a ton of time here:

• onboarding: just create a new phone number and give access to your company-shared phonebook

• offboarding: just shut down the leaving employee's phone number from your interface.

5. Enriched data

Calls are a trove of data very often untapped: call history, contacts data, call analytics… We are used to having these features in our CRM, sales, or HR tools but not for our business calls.

Having a centralized call history with insights about all the calls happening within your company is a great way to visualize potential bottlenecks or process to improve.

If it speaks to you and you want to give it a try don’t hesitate to contact us (+ contact info and button as usual).

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Published on May 9, 2014.