August is when the gaps in a phone system show. Half the team is on holiday, some of the rest are working from home, and the desk phone in reception rings out to a voicemail nobody checks until September.
Customers do not know or care who is on leave. They only know whether someone answered.
The problem with a phone on a desk
Traditional phone systems tie a number to a handset, and a handset to a desk. That made sense when everyone came into the office every day. Now it means:
Calls ring at empty desks, then go to voicemail.
Staff working from home give out their mobile numbers, so customer calls bypass the business entirely and leave with the person when they leave.
Holiday cover is a manual job: someone has to remember to divert the line, and remember to undo it.
How hosted voice changes that
With hosted telephony, your phone system lives in the cloud rather than in a cabinet in the office. Your numbers belong to the business, not to a desk.
Calls on any device. The same extension rings on a desk phone, a softphone app on a laptop, or a mobile app. Staff working from home or on the road make and take calls as if they were in the office, showing the business number, not their own.
Call routing that matches how you work. Hunt groups ring a team together or in turn, so the first available person answers. If nobody picks up, the call moves to the next group rather than straight to voicemail.
Auto-attendants and time-based rules. Different routing for office hours, lunchtime, evenings and bank holidays, set once and applied automatically.
Changes without a site visit. Adding a temporary member of staff, moving someone to a different team or changing what happens over the holidays is a quick change, not an engineer’s visit.
Planning for the next holiday season
Whatever phone system you use, a few questions are worth asking before the next busy holiday period:
Where does a call go when nobody answers? Ring your own main number from a mobile and find out.
Who checks the voicemail? If the answer is “the person on holiday”, change it.
Are customers being given personal mobile numbers? If so, the business is losing the record of those calls.
How long would it take to change your call routing? If it needs an engineer, it is too slow.
Hosted, Mitel or both
We install and support both hosted voice and on-site Mitel systems, and the right answer depends on your business. Hosted suits businesses that want flexibility without equipment to maintain. A Mitel system suits those with more complex call handling or a contact centre. Many of the features above are available on both.
With the analogue phone network switching off in January 2027, now is also a good time to make sure your phone system is ready (see our PSTN switch-off guide).
To find out how hosted telephony would work for your business, see Odyssey Voice, talk to us or call 01642 661888. We answer within three rings, holidays included.