Choosing business telephones

When choosing telephone systems, most of the attention goes to the brains of the system: the PBX unit, for example. However, you should make sure you evaluate the business phones themselves, too.

You'll want to start with the basic business phones. Most new business phones are display phones – they have a small screen that shows information such as the name and extension of an internal caller, the duration of call, and in some cases, caller ID.

Speaker phones are familiar fixtures in many conference rooms, but are also now standard on most new handsets. Speaker phones can be half-duplex, which means that only one person on the call can be heard at a time, or full-duplex, which lets both parties talk simultaneously, like a normal phone.

Executive phones, as the name implies, are high-end business phones designed to look good on an executive’s desk. They don't usually offer much in the way of extra functionality – but they do cost quite a bit more. They’re usually not worth the money.

At the other end of the company hierarchy, receptionist switchboards are a must for any office with more than a handful of phone lines and someone to answer them. They make it easy to see who's on the phone and to juggle multiple incoming calls.

Although having the right features is important, even more critical is making sure those features are easy to access. Because most employees devote very little time to learning how to use their business phones, you should make sure that using the most common functions is extremely simple and intuitive.