Picture your traditional “office” setting. It always included a spacious desk, big monitor, hopefully a comfortable chair, and always a large often clunky desk phone. As offices have changed over the past few years due to the increase in remote work, the traditional desk phone has become less important.
When Covid shut down so many businesses early this year, most were able to pivot to remote work environments relatively quickly. Their employees already had laptops to take home. Many businesses had important documents or services running through the cloud, making remote connection simple. One missing piece to the ultimate remote worker set up was “How do employees make and receive calls?”
For many employees this meant forwarding their office number to their cell phones or in many cases giving out their personal number for convenience. It’s easy to imagine everything wrong with this scenario – employees are now mixing business into their everyday lives and using a personal phone plan for making and receiving calls. There are also security risks to consider as a personal cell phone is usually not encrypted and more vulnerable to threat.
For organizations continuing remote work into 2021, a better solution is needed to help employees make calls efficiently and keep company and personal information separate. For businesses using O365 from Microsoft, the answer is a Teams with Voice integration. The Teams platform comes with most basic O365 subscriptions. Organizations may already be leveraging it as their collaboration tool, taking advantage of the chat and channel features, as well as the integration with Sharepoint and OneDrive for file sharing and management.
The Teams with Voice integration take this a step further. Instead of just being able to call employees inside your internal network via Teams, a voice integration makes Teams a singular calling platform. It can be deployed as a completely cloud based solution, meaning the server required to run the system sits in the cloud. For organizations getting rid of their physical offices, Teams with Voice can help your entire office run remotely.
What more can Teams with Voice do? Pretty much anything your traditional phone was doing. You can set up an auto attendant to route calls to the correct queues, integrate with call center software, set up cloud voicemail and more. For organizations needing to meet HIPAA compliance, Teams can provide lines with end to end encryption.
Is your organization ready to ditch those antiquated, bulky desk phone and move to a leaner, more streamlined solution for Voice? Let us help you imagine what your remote office could be!
