Hosted PBX Services with a Great Mobile Application

One of the great features of a hosted PBX service is the fact every employee can have a mobile app, for your company’s phone system.

If a cloud pbx provider shows you a demo of their mobile app, it will probably look great and a lot like the others… but look closer!

What makes a “great hosted PBX app”? In this short video, AeroCom President, Mike Smith gives you several essential items to look for, when a potential hosted PBX provider is showing you a demo of their mobile app.

Which cloud PBX service providers have a great mobile application? Click below and ask Mike today!

Ask Mike

About Mike
Mike Smith is the Founder and President of AeroCom and has been helping companies with telecom and cloud services since 1999. He has been the recipient of numerous business telecommunications industry awards and in 2011, he was honored as one of the top 40 business people in Orange County, CA., under 40 years old. You can also hear him as the host of the popular Information Technology podcast, ITsmiths with Mike Smith. Follow Mike on LinkedIn, Twitter or SpiceWorks.

Transcript

Which hosted VoIP service providers have the best mobile applications? Well, there’s a few of them, but it really depends on your company’s requirements. But what I can tell you is that there’s certain things that to me, make a great mobile application.

Number one first and foremost, is does the mobile app match the softphone app? So that’s really big for your users. So say if your company’s shopping for the stuff and you implement a new hosted VoIP solution, you want it to be as user friendly as possible. One of the ways of doing that is making it a seamless experience whether a user is on their mobile app or on the softphone, don’t give them more things to learn. So that’s number one and believe it or not, a lot of service providers have a different mobile app experience than the softphone experience. So make sure you look for that first and foremost.

The second is making sure the mobile app is user-friendly. It sounds very simple in concept and what I mean by user-friendly is the features that you’re going to use the most need to be user friendly. So those would be first and foremost can I find users easily on my mobile app that are with my company? So can I find my company contacts easily and can I easily see their status if they’re on the phone, if they’re not on the phone, can I chat with that person directly on the mobile app right away? Can I see my voicemails on the mobile app? Can I see my voicemail transcriptions on the mobile app? Can I delete my voicemails from the mobile app? That’s a big one because a lot of times you can’t, and that’s a big pain in the neck if you have to go back to your desk phone to delete voicemails, instead of just being able to hit a delete button on your mobile app.

Another thing that is interesting is being able to flip calls back and forth from your mobile app to your desk phone. So say if you’re in the office and you’re on a conference call and you want to flip that call onto your mobile app because it’s five o’clock and you need to start heading home, but you don’t want to drop the call necessarily. You want to continue on the conversation, but on your mobile app, is that an easy feature for your users to do? Is it hard to find? So make sure that, that’s the case.

Also coinciding with that, is it easy to set up your ability to flip from Wi-Fi internet connectivity through your mobile app to cellular connectivity with your mobile app? So this is a big one, I’ve done this before, so say you’re on a call, you flip it to your mobile app, you go to leave the office and then as soon as you leave Wi-Fi range, the call drops. So the flip didn’t really help you out a whole lot because as soon as you left your company, you lost the call anyway. So make sure that functionality is very easy for a user to understand and know how to use, how to change from Wi-Fi internet so that the call was going over Wi-Fi, or going over the internet connection versus the calls going across the user’s cellular connection.

Also, make sure it’s easy for your users to be able to quickly hit things like do not disturb, that’s a common feature. Or maybe they want to work remotely off of a landline, make sure it’s easy to do remote office so you can easily press up on.

So those are just some examples of some things you want to make sure easy to use on the mobile app. So make sure number one, that the mobile app matches the softphone and number two, that all those things are very easy to use.

So maybe even brainstorm with your users, what are they going to use the most on the mobile app and make sure those are very user friendly.

I hope that helps if you want some good recommendations of hosted VoIP service providers that are a great fit for your company and that also have a great mobile app, reach out and let me know. I’m happy to help. Don’t spend hours on Google, we don’t charge you for recommendations, there’s no reason to waste your time. Just shoot me an email. Give me a call (714-593-0011). We’ll have a quick chat about your company’s requirements and call flows and I’ll tell you the best three to five hosted VoIP service providers that your company should be quoting and why. I’ll also introduce you to the right people at those companies. So you’re working with a nice, honest person who gives you great pricing. I hope that helps, have a great day.