Depending on your specific business profile, the number of phone lines your business will need may vary. While you certainly don’t need one phone line per employee, you also don’t want to cut too many corners.
To help you decide how many phone lines your business will need, consider the following:
- Most of its employees are in the field: If you have a construction company with 50 employees and only four of them work in the office, leaving the rest on construction sites, you don’t need 50 phone lines. Instead, you’d be wise to purchase four lines for your office employees, plus a voice mail line and one or two lines for your fax machines. You can vary this setting, of course. If your business is very busy, consider purchasing three or four fax lines.
- You have a high volume of daily incoming and outgoing calls: If you own a telemarketing company with 25 employees, each of whom makes phone calls 8 hours a day, you should consider purchasing 35 or 40 lines just for calls made by your employees. Adding another two lines for faxes is also a good idea.
As a general rule of thumb, if your company has around 15 employees, you should consider purchasing a phone line for each employee who makes calls in your office. But if your business has more than 15 employees, a cheaper solution is to move to a dedicated circuit containing 24 phone lines.
Interestingly, if your business is growing, you will actually need fewer phone lines per employee as the number of employees increases. While this increased number of employees will likely make more calls, the probability that all employees will make or receive calls at exactly the same time is low. Chances are when one employee hangs up the phone to do some work, another will pick up the phone to make another call.
To understand the volume of phone calls for your business, review the detailed call list on your phone bill to determine the number of calls made during peak hours. A better approach is to scan your phone bill and determine if all phone numbers are being used. If several of your phone numbers are set up for incoming faxes or are set up for your security system and are not currently in use, you most likely have too many lines.
However, on the other hand, if customers, employees, or associates complain that they keep getting a busy signal when they call your business, you probably need to add a few more lines.
Before you rush out and buy more phone lines, be sure to fix the bottleneck in your phone system. It could be caused by a card failure that caused you to lose ten lines on your phone system. If after troubleshooting your hardware you find no problem, order additional lines to match the number of people affected by the line shortage. Maybe the HR department hired 20 more people and didn’t tell you. If during peak calling hours, 10 people in your office can’t get outside lines, order 12 more lines.
In short, the number of phone lines your business needs depends on the number of employees in the office (as opposed to those in the field) and the volume of their calls during peak hours. Taking a look at your company’s past call logs will go a long way in determining the number of phone lines needed.