Improving Phone Accessibility

Belfabriek / 18 Jun 2024 / 4 min read

Improving phone accessibility, better accessibility for landline numbers, flexible call forwarding—these are all search terms we are often found for.

To understand the meaning behind these search terms, it’s good to look at what these users currently use as their telephony setup, what the problems are, and why they are searching for a better telephony solution and a different provider.

Office Telephony

Most organizations and entrepreneurs have a business office telephony setup: an environment designed for users at one fixed location (the office), possibly with some additional endpoints like a remote worker.

This is a fine solution if you want to equip every desk with a phone so people can make calls.

Desire for More Flexible Call Forwarding

However, there is often a desire to handle incoming calls more flexibly; people are:

no longer always in the office,
colleagues are spread across different locations, and
sometimes a colleague only has a mobile phone.

This is often the case with emergency service numbers, on-call service numbers, and fault-reporting numbers: these need to be set up with all employees at all possible locations and networks.

Flexible working hours and flexible work arrangements ensure that people want to have optimal control over the accessibility of the emergency number.

Solution: Phone Team Page - Forwarding to All Mobile and Landline Numbers

For this, we have the phone team page, where everyone who can answer phone calls can set themselves as available or unavailable.

The order in which calls are handled can also be changed in real-time: do you want calls to go to another colleague first, with yourself as a backup? Drag your colleague to position 1 in the phone team and yourself to position 2.

This method of management is easy for every employee to understand, and since everyone has their own login, they can easily create a phone team this way. There is no limit to the number of people or phone lines that can be processed this way: no call is ever missed, and adjustments can always be made flexibly.

It’s also important that you’re not dependent on one network or provider: it works with all mobile phones and landlines. We forward calls to any desired phone number—national or international.

This is often the solution for organizations and entrepreneurs who want to forward calls flexibly: they are no longer tied to a location or provider but can add anyone to the phone team to answer calls. This way, a support number, sales line, or emergency number can be set up quickly!

Let Our IVR Platform Route Calls Smarter

Do you want to add even more functionality to your phone number? That’s no problem. With our advanced IVR (Interactive Voice Response) platform, we can also handle calls entirely or partially automatically.

For example, do you want to record and email a fault report? That’s possible; this way, you can have a fault-reporting line active 24/7 without it being answered live.

Recording a message, fault, or order and emailing it to one or more people is often even easier and delivers better results: multiple people receive the message, and it is responded to more quickly.

Don’t want to listen to a recording first but want a recorded message emailed as text? That’s also possible: this way, someone can immediately see if something is urgent or not. The message appears as text in the body of your email or as an attachment; it’s also handy to forward to a colleague for follow-up.

How to Set This Up?

Does this sound so good that you want to test it first? That’s possible. Request a demo number, enter your colleagues into the phone team, and see how you can distribute calls smartly.

Is this exactly what you’re looking for? Then choose a phone number in our shop, or if you already have a phone number, indicate that you want to keep your existing number: with number portability, we will transfer your existing number from the old provider to us, your new provider.

You now have your sales line, customer service number, or emergency service set up in the most flexible way!

If your office telephony is otherwise fine, you can keep it with your other provider: we prefer to focus our platform on phone numbers with many useful features and work with all current networks and systems.

You definitely don’t need to move your entire telephony setup. If you are happy with your desk phones and want to keep them, you can leave them with your current provider. We can activate a new phone number for you or transfer your existing phone number to our platform so you can flexibly distribute your incoming calls this way.

You can change your phone team, modify profiles, and rearrange team members as often as you like.

You can forward calls to any desired country within Europe or the United States. Setting up a European phone team this way is simple, and with a multilingual menu, you can create multiple teams for different languages.

Enter your current phone number when placing your order, and with number portability, we will transfer your phone number. This takes a maximum of 5 working days, after which your old number will be active on our platform.

In our portal, you can enter the opening hours during which the line should be reachable. If you’re closed, we can play a closed message or offer a voicemail.

Ensure that all colleagues to whom you want to forward calls are entered in your phone team. At that point, everyone is flexibly deployable, and you can set someone as available or unavailable to answer calls. You can also assign priority by placing someone in the 1st, 2nd, etc., position to indicate who our telephony platform should connect to first.

Number portability is always possible: it is regulated by European law that you must be able to transfer a phone number to a new provider. This way, you can use the latest telephony services with your old phone number!

You can handle flexible working hours in two ways: 1. Enter the working hours under opening hours in the settings. This option is most convenient if a number is always closed or open at a fixed time. 2. If working hours are very flexible, it’s easier to set everyone to ‘unavailable’ when the line is (suddenly) closed. This way, no one is free to answer calls, and a message or voicemail is played. This allows you to work flexibly with your phone number in two ways, even if the numbers are spread across different providers.

You can keep your old subscription and transfer your old phone number to our platform. You can then immediately switch flexibly and forward calls flexibly.