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In every area of business, the best solutions have a few core items in common. Business phone systems are no different.
While different vendors offer different features and have varying strengths and weaknesses, the best business communications systems all offer a few key staples:
Reliability
Reliability is perhaps the most important feature that the best phone systems have in common. If you cannot count on your phone to ring when someone calls you or to offer a clear signal with no static, noise, or connectivity issues, then you have a problem. In its initial iterations, VoIP could be significantly less reliable than analog phone systems, but that’s not the case anymore. As long as you choose a VoIP provider that is committed to an effective deployment plan, including the proper routing of traffic so that you do not experience dropped calls, echo, or jitter, then VoIP can be extremely reliable.Scalability
The best phone systems for any business will not only fit their needs today but also tomorrow and into the future for the life of the system. A good phone system should be easy to scale, whether that means adding more phones for a busy season or downsizing your monthly bill when your needs change. When it comes to scalability, there is no real comparison -- VoIP comes out ahead. With a best-of-breed on-prem or cloud-based VoIP system, adding more lines is as simple as plugging in a new handset or even a softphone client. When your phone system is scalable, that’s one less thing you have to worry about when making bigger business decisions.Flexibility
In most industries, workers are rarely tied to their desks anymore. Remote work has become more common, and distributed teams in different time zones -- or different continents -- are not unusual. The best business phone systems can accommodate this type of company easily. Flexibility in your phone system means that your employees can get calls at their desk, home office, or mobile phone using the same phone number. Flexibility means that if no one answers at one location, your phone can automatically forward the call to another location.Features
If you are upgrading a business phone system, you surely know how many options are available when it comes to features. Getting into which features will work best for your team depends heavily on which features they will actually use. For instance, if you have a team that would rather walk down the hall and speak face-to-face than send an instant message, that feature may not be critical for your phone. No matter what the features are, choose a phone provider that can offer a setup that makes sense for your individual needs, rather than a one-size-fits-all solution. 
