When starting your own business, one of the best decisions you can make is using phone numbers with extensions. Virtual phone systems come with a variety of features including extension numbers. As departments are added and more employees are hired, you will eventually need to find a way to keep everyone in contact with each other through one line. Extension numbers are the easiest way to keep your entire company together under one number. They enable your customers and clients can use to find exactly who they need with just the press of a number.
What are Phone Extensions?
Extensions are assigned numbers under one main business phone number. You can assign these extensions to members of your team or individual departments that get multiple phone calls such as a customer service department or a sales department.
Phone extensions are also helpful for customers and clients that need to get into contact with one specific person. With a virtual phone number system, you will have the feature of an auto attendant, which can be in charge of greeting your customers and automatically routing them to the right employee or division of the business. This way, if your customers do not know the exact extension they need for a department or an employee, they can figure it out through a menu of options.
You can also create shortcuts between employees with phone extensions. Your employees will have an easier time contacting different members of their team when they each have their own extension.
How Do They Work?
Extensions are a group of numbers that follow your main business number. These are usually four-digits long. It is up to you how many digits you want to use after your extension. For example, if you have two employees at your company with their own extensions, you can assign them 123 and 456 or any combination that works for you. When a customer calls, they will use the form of business phone number + 123 or 456 depending on who they want to reach. The employee at 123 can also simply pick up his or her company phone and dial 456 to contact the other employee and vice versa. These extensions can also be under a different department. Therefore if the sales department extension is 9 and a customer wanted to reach one of these two employees directly, they would have to dial the business phone number + 9 + 123.
Extensions can also be used as a way to monitor the effectiveness of ad campaigns. If you decide to advertise the business phone number with an extension, you can track how many phone calls are received from that extension from your account. You could also use different extensions on multiple forms of advertising to find out which ones are working the best for your company and which ones you should stop using.
Extensions as Part of a Virtual Phone System
One of the best parts about using a virtual phone system with extensions is that you can reach out to employees and departments located in most parts of the world. If your finance department is located in Montana, but your customer service department is located in India, you can still be under the same business phone number umbrella. This is also good for companies that have employees who travel abroad. Because although an employee is based in Montana, if they are going to work in France, you can still reach them through their business number for no additional cost.
Virtual Phone Numbers
Extensions can be used within a virtual phone system. A virtual phone system uses VoIP to forward calls from one device to another. The phone numbers are connected over the internet and you are charged based on the rates of whichever VoIP provider you choose. Phone extensions work similarly to virtual phone systems. They can be forwarded to another device as well as a voicemail box. In essence, extensions and virtual phone systems work the same way. Contact us to learn more about virtual phone systems for your business.