Essentials to Work from Home

Remote work has been part of our reality for quite a few years, but the recent outbreak of Coronavirus (COVID-19) has made it mandatory for most businesses in order to maintain business continuity. However, some businesses have never fully tested their work-from-home contingency plan. This on-going crisis has forced many organizations to nearly adopt an overnight strategy. The team at VoIP.ms has gathered some of the key essentials to maintain business continuity while working from home.

1. When it comes to communications, use the softphone of your choice. There is a plurality of options and it is set up in a matter of minutes.

To start working from home, the first thing to take into consideration is to remain in touch with the same landline and extension that you have at work. A softphone is a software application that can be added to any existing computer or mobile device. As a result, there is no need for a business to invest in any additional hardware equipment. Softphones are amongst the most scalable option available on the market. You or your IT department can install the software of your choice and get started right away. As long as you are connected to the internet, there is theoretically no place where you cannot make or receive a call.

To know more about softphones, please refer to our Wiki article here: https://wiki.voip.ms/article/Softphones

2. An easy one, set up a Call Forward and increase your mobility.

One common and most used features is Call Forwarding. This way, you can stay in touch with your customers, no matter where you are. This feature allows an incoming call to be redirected to a mobile telephone or any other telephone number where the desired called party is able to answer. You can set a Call Forwarding to any number, even international numbers.

Learn how to set it up right here: https://wiki.voip.ms/article/Call_Forwarding

3. To bring your mobility to the next level, set up Call Hunting!

The Call Hunting feature is commonly known as the “find me” feature. It simply means that an incoming call can be configured to ring multiple phones or devices, one after the other until it gets answered or gets transferred to the voicemail if the person is not available.

Here is the link to our step by step guide to set it up: https://wiki.voip.ms/article/Call_Hunting

4. Got teams? Distribute your calls properly, set up some Ring Groups!

Using the ring groups feature, you can easily distribute the incoming calls among the employees of a particular department like sales, customer support or tech. In other words, the ring group feature allows you to have 8 phones to ring at the same time when one number or extension is dialed.

Here is the direct link to our step-by-step guide to set up yours: https://wiki.voip.ms/article/Ring_Group

5. Stay in touch with everybody over phone, set up your conference bridge.

Conference bridge provides a virtual room to simultaneously get in touch with a group of clients and/or your team! Setting up your conference bridge is easy and can be done within a few seconds.

Get started right here: https://wiki.voip.ms/article/Audio_Conferencing

We hope these few tips will help you and your team quickly build intuitive and powerful remote office workspaces. All these features can be used together in order to create an effective phone system to reflect your business reality even in a remote situation. If this is still not clear to you or you need any assistance with your business continuity plan, reach out to our support team over live chat right here (https://voip.ms/?startchat=1) or send us an e-mail at [email protected].