TMCnews Featured Article

If you can’t beat em, join em.

Office phones are not dead yet, but they certainly are on the decline. As long ago as 2013, sales of smartphones surpassed that of traditional phones according to IDC (News - Alert) research. It now seems almost archaic to pick up a phone tethered to a desk. Why would any employee do that in 2015 when they can use their smartphone for the same task?

Businesses have gotten wise to this fact, and the office phone increasingly is moving to the mobile handset, too, via mobile VoIP technology.

There’s still a case for having an office phone. Businesses and employees both have an incentive to keep work and personal calls separate, and handing out a personal cell phone number does not serve a business well when an employee leaves a company.

Yet having the office phone in the office does not work any longer. The mobile worker needs calling outside of the office. Workers also need the functionality they expect from their smartphone, something that landlines cannot always provide.

Helping office phones move to this new environment is mobile VoIP, which effectively untethers the office phone from the office.

With mobile VoIP, the business phone can follow the employee anywhere they go through the use of a mobile VoIP app on their phone.

Employees can get the mobility and ease of use they need, yet the office phone can live on.

Better yet, businesses don’t need to rely on employee phone numbers or having their customers walking off when the employee leaves a company.

Mobile VoIP also brings added features such as cloud-based address books and auto-attendant functionality, in many cases.

The flexibility of mobile VoIP goes beyond even what smartphones can provide, too, because when a smartphone is out of coverage or low on battery, the mobile VoIP number can be routed to a different phone such as a home-office or hotel phone.

The days of the traditional office phone are numbered, but the office phone isn’t going away. The office phone just is getting smarter.