If you’re looking to set up a modern business VoIP system you’re in the right place. I’m going to show you in 4 easy steps how to set up a VoIP right through your browser. By the end of this video you’ll be able to build a VoIP phone system powerful enough for a big company but simple enough to use for a small business. Before we dive in, it’s important to understand a little bit about VoIP platforms. On one end, there are VoIP API services that require programming and specialized expertise.
On the other end are services like Telzio that provide an out-of-the-box VoIP solution made for small to medium sized companies. With Telzio, you get all the calling features you need, plus the flexibility to customize your business phone system through an easy-to-use portal. Let’s get started and you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about. Step 1 is to choose a new phone number, or port your existing number If you already have a phone number you want to keep, that’s great. You can port your phone numbers from your old service provider with no downtime.
To initiate a porting, all you have to do is submit a port request through our website, along with a copy of your phone bill. Shortly after you submit the request, you’ll get an email to let you know the exact time and date the porting will take place. Porting numbers usually take around one week. In the meantime, you can set up all your users and features, so that your phone system is ready to go before the number ports. To get started, Telzio provides you with a free “temporary” phone number so you can preconfigure all your features, and test it to make sure everything is working the way you want it to.
Now, if you need to get a new phone number, that’s easy to do. Purchasing a new phone number is instant, and there’s no shortage of numbers to choose from.
Telzio has a large inventory of local phone numbers and toll-free numbers from over 60 countries. Once you’ve settled on a phone number, there are a few useful features you’ll probably want to take advantage of. CNAM or caller ID name allows you to register your business name so that it shows up as your caller ID.
This is a great feature for any business, and you’ll want to check out our video on CNAM to learn more about it. Spam blocking is exactly what it sounds like. Telzio runs calls through an algorithm that’s continuously learning by analyzing billions of calls and then filters out calls that are likely to be spam. This is a great feature that will help prevent unwanted telemarketing calls. You can check this video if you want to learn more about our spam blocking feature.
SMS.
If you’re already texting customers or thinking you’d like to start, that’s probably a smart move. You can use both your local numbers and toll-free numbers for text messaging through the Telzio app on the Dashboard.
E911, or simply, 911 service. If you have an office or store location, you’ll want to register your physical address with your phone number.
That way if there’s ever an emergency, the local dispatchers will already have your location. Onto step 2 – adding users to your phone system. You can give employees an extension or a direct phone number by creating a User for them. Users enable employees to log into the Telzio portal to manage their phone calls, messages, greeting, hold music, and other settings.
It also enables them to connect to VoIP phones, and use the Telzio Mobile App.
Adding users is simple. All you need to do is click to add a new user, and fill out the details here. What’s really great about Telzio is that we don’t charge you for users.
All your users are included, so you can continue to add extensions at no extra cost. Once you create the user, they’ll receive an email with their login, and can begin to start making calls through the app and the webphone.
A user can have their own direct number, or simply an extension of the main company number. If a user has multiple phone numbers, they can choose which phone number they want to make a call from. One of the advantages of using VoIP is that there’s no limit to the number of simultaneous calls that can be going on, on a single phone number.
This means that you can eliminate rollover lines and busy signals altogether. You can give users different administrative levels, allowing them to access certain parts of your phone system.
For example, you can give the accounting department access to Billing, and customer service managers access to Call Recordings. Once you’ve created users, you can start routing calls to them. That leads us to step 3 – Create a Call Flow to route incoming calls.
Now, this is the fun part, where we actually design some really cool features for your phone system. You’d think you need a lot of technical experience to do this, but we’ve made it really easy.
A Call Flow essentially tells your phone system how to handle incoming calls. Let’s go over some of the features you can add to your call flow, and set up an example.
Opening Hours is a feature that allows you to route calls based on company office hours or individual schedules. For example, let’s say we’re open from 9 am to 5, Monday through Friday. You can see how this created two additional paths in my call flow – one for when we’re open, and one for when we’re closed.
To keep it simple, let’s just send all calls after hours to a voicemail. You can keep the default greeting in there, or you can customize your greeting by either uploading an audio file or recording directly through the browser using our text-to-speech tool. Also included is a voicemail transcription, so you can save time by reading the voicemail as text in your email.
Now for when we’re open – I’m going to add one of our most popular features – a phone menu, also known as an auto attendant. Here you can customize a greeting and direct callers via their dial-pad.
For example, Please press 1 to hear our business hours, press 2 to speak to a sales rep, press 3 for customer service, or press 4 for the company directory.
I’ll mark the 4 options provided to the caller, hit update, and you’ll see how 4 additional legs were created based on those selections. For option 1 to hear business hours, I’ll add an Announcement. Here, you can customize a message with some relevant info.
You can have the call end there by leaving the next step empty, or you can continue to build out the call flow following the announcement.
For option 2 to speak to a sales rep, I’ll add a Forwarding feature. Here, you can create hunt groups, and route calls to a list of users, groups, or other phone numbers. You can set calls to ring everyone at the same time, or in the order listed. You can choose from our selection of hold music and you also upload your own custom hold music.
You can also enable call recording, and record all calls that come in through this path.
Now if the caller chooses option 3 for customer service, we’re going to use a Queue. The Queue is different from the forwarding feature in that it places callers on hold until the next agent is available. This is a great feature to use for customer support lines and call centres where users are on the phone a lot.
You can also get instant insight on-hold times, missed calls and other data through the Call Analytics on the Telzio Dashboard. Finally for option 4 to hear the company directory, I’ll go ahead and drop that feature in here.
As you can see, call flows are really flexible, and you can use any of these features in different parts of your flow. Before we move onto the next step, I want to touch on a couple of the other features here that you can use. Conferences. You can host conference calls with Telzio, and create multiple conference “rooms” where you can invite people to join by simply providing them with the PIN. SMS.
You can automate text messages to incoming callers, and create a custom text that might, for example, send the caller a link to where they can subscribe to your newsletter. With our Stripe integration, you can even accept payments over the phone.
There are some cool features to play around with here, so you can get creative and design a custom call flow that works for your business. Now that we have our call routing set up, let’s talk about phones. That brings us to step 4 – setting up VoIP phones.
With VoIP, you get quite a bit of flexibility when it comes to the type of phones you want to use. You can opt for physical office phones that sit on your desk, or you can use our mobile app, or you can use our webphone from your computer. Getting started with the mobile app is simple. All you have to do is download the app and log in with the user that you created back in step 2. If all you want to use are mobile phones, then you’re all set.
Your business phone system is in place and you can start taking calls. The webphone is a virtual phone that’s built into the Telzio website. You don’t have to download anything to use it. Just log into Telzio.com with your username, and you can find the webphone in the bottom right corner of the page.
As for desk phones, you’ll want to use IP phones with your VoIP system. IP phones connect directly to your internet network and look and feel just like a traditional office phone. If you’re wondering whether you can still use your old landline phones, the answer is yes, you can but with an adaptor, but we still highly recommend investing in IP phones to get the most out of your VoIP service and the best call quality. One of the advantages of using a VoIP service like Telzio is that you can set up phones in multiple different locations, and still be connected to the same system. This is great for companies with remote offices and employees who work from home.
Setting up IP phones is actually really easy, and you don’t need a technician to come out and set it up for you.
Telzio auto provisions the phones, meaning that we automatically enter all the settings into the phone to get it to work. All you have to do is plug them in. There are specific VoIP phones that we recommend for small businesses, and we can ship those to you ready-for-calling.
