In order to meet the needs of my staff, I recently changed the business phone systems in the company I own. I wish I could say it was to meet the needs of our customers, but I'm afraid that's not true. See, with our old phone system, we had a lot more extensions than lines. It was built with the idea that communication between offices would be used more than calls coming in and going out. Since my company does most of its business over the internet and not much over the phone, the system I set up in the late 1990s worked well for us until just recently. Recently, vendors who used to call me have started sending me emails instead. They were saying that it's hard to get in touch with me. I did some research, and this is what I found... The majority of my workers spent a lot of time talking on the phone. They weren't talking to vendors, customers, service providers, or any other business entities. Instead, they used the phone for their own purposes.
Don't get me wrong—I'm not the kind of boss who thinks talking on the phone is never okay. I know that things are bound to come up during the workday that will need an employee's attention. All of us have been there. Maybe a child is sick or the car is getting fixed at the shop. I know that most of the time, these things take time on the phone. But based on how much traffic was on my lines and how high my phone bills were, I don't think any employer would consider this to be acceptable.
So, I made the decision to get rid of the old phone system. Every extension, including mine, has a line in the new system, so vendors or anyone else can reach me at any time. Since the new phone system also has more features, I had an extra one programmed in.
Now, when someone makes an outgoing call, they have to dial their own code so that the number they call and the amount of time they spend on the call can be tracked. These records are matched with the phone bill, and every employee has to mark the calls they make each month that are not for business. Since their code is on the calls, they can't say that someone else made the call. They must, of course, pay for these calls. I've noticed that both the number of calls I make and the amount I pay for them have gone down a lot.
