10 reasons desk phones still belong in your office phone system

Every year or two someone pitches your office a laptop, a headset and an app as the whole office phone system. For most Southwest Washington businesses that's the wrong trade, at least for the desks that answer the calls. Meanwhile the desk phone itself has kept getting better. Here are ten practical reasons to keep one on the desk.

What does a desk phone add to an office phone system?

Desk phones for business add a real handset, a speakerphone and line keys, and they run on the same system as the phone app on a laptop or cell (a softphone). The Cisco 8841 and 8851 handsets we install are IP phones. They plug into the same network as your computers, run on the same Cisco phone system as those softphones, and get updates like any other managed device, so nothing about them is old.

So the choice is a desk phone or an app on something else, and for the desks that answer your calls the physical phone still does ten things better.

Reasons 1 to 3: it sounds better and it stays up

1. The audio is better, and so is the speakerphone

A desk phone has a real handset, a real speaker and a microphone built for one job. A Cisco desk phone uses wideband (HD) audio and cancels background noise, so the caller hears you and not the printer. A softphone borrows whatever microphone the laptop has.

The gap is widest on speakerphone. The 8841 handles a patient and two family members gathered around the desk. A laptop speaker doesn't, and a cell on speaker in a busy office is a coin flip. Sound also depends on the network; our post on why Cisco phone systems sound better covers the switch, the Wi-Fi and the voice VLAN.

2. It works when the laptop is dead or the cell has no bars

A softphone lives on a computer. When the laptop is rebooting, or the battery is flat, or the app logged itself out overnight, the phone is gone with it. A cell has its own list: no signal at the back of the building, a dead battery, a personal call already in progress.

A desk phone is on, registered and ringing whenever the office is, with no battery to charge and no login to remember. When someone dials 911 from it, the system passes the office's registered address to 911, and that address is right because the phone never leaves the desk.

3. PoE keeps it ringing through a power blip

Modern desk phones draw power over the same network cable that carries the call (Power over Ethernet, or PoE), so there's one cable and no wall adapter or power strip under the desk. We power every phone from a PoE switch in the network closet, part of the network we design and install with the phones.

Put that switch on a battery backup (a UPS), along with the router, the internet modem and the phone system itself if it lives on site. Then the phones ride through the short outages of a wet winter here. The flicker that reboots every PC leaves the phones ringing, and with an on-premise Cisco PBX, extension-to-extension calls and intercom keep working over the local network even if the internet drops.

Reasons 4 to 6: the front desk moves faster

4. One-touch transfer, park and intercom

Picture the front desk of a law office in downtown Olympia in the 8:05am rush, when the lines light up before the second person is in the door. Two calls are ringing, a client is at the counter for the first appointment, and an attorney wants to know who is on hold. On a desk phone the receptionist presses one key to park the call (hold it where any phone can pick it up), one to page the attorney over intercom, and one to transfer. The buttons beside the screen light up to show who is busy.

On an app that same sequence is a click, a search box and a menu. The Cisco 8851 we put at reception takes a key expansion module (a sidecar of extra line keys) that the 8841 does not, so a receptionist can see and reach every extension at a glance. For training, a supervisor can listen in, or coach a new hire mid-call without the caller hearing.

5. Always on, no app, no login

Some phones don't belong to a person: the lobby phone, the phone on the warehouse wall in Centralia, the conference room phone. Nobody logs into those. They have to work for whoever walks up, whether that's a driver, a temp, or the owner's nephew on a Saturday.

A softphone is tied to a user account on a device. A wall-mounted desk phone or an 8832 conference phone is tied to a place. It's there, it's on, and the next person can pick it up.

6. Callers get a professional experience

The caller judges your business by what they hear. A desk phone on a business system answers with a proper greeting, holds with music instead of silence, and transfers cleanly to a named extension. A cell number on a business card gives the caller a personal voicemail greeting, a barking dog, or the highway.

A phone that only makes calls also doesn't pop a notification mid-sentence, so your staff can give the caller their full attention.

Reasons 7 to 9: boundaries, security and ease of use

7. Work stays on the work phone

When staff use personal cells for work, their personal number ends up on customer invoices, and when they leave, the customers keep calling a phone you don't own. A desk phone on your system means the number, the voicemail and the call history belong to the business.

It's better for the employee too. Nobody has to give out a personal number, or take a work call in the grocery store because the office line was forwarded to their cell "just for today."

8. It lives on a managed network you control

A desk phone is a single-purpose device. It doesn't browse the web or open email attachments, which makes it a much smaller target than a laptop that does both and also runs the phone app.

On our installs the phones sit on their own segment of the network (a voice VLAN) behind the business firewall, separate from guest Wi-Fi and the PCs. Calls to the phone system can be encrypted too. For a clinic in Longview that has to think about patient privacy under HIPAA, or a firm that records its calls, that separation is easier to prove. It's infrastructure security done at the network level, and it doesn't depend on what's installed on anyone's laptop.

9. Anyone can use it

It's a keypad, a handset and a few labelled keys. A new hire who has never seen your software can answer, hold and transfer on day one, and an employee who doesn't love computers isn't asked to run their phone through one. Someone with a hearing aid gets a hearing-aid-compatible earpiece and a big backlit screen with caller ID they can read.

A handset at the ear also beats hunching over a laptop microphone for a forty-minute call.

Softphone vs desk phone: do you have to pick one?

No, and most of our customers don't. That is the tenth reason.

10. It pairs with a softphone instead of competing with it

The same Cisco system that runs the 8841 on the desk runs a softphone on an iPhone, Android, Mac or PC, and a person has one extension, one voicemail box and one number across both. The desk phone is the anchor. It's where the receptionist parks and transfers, and it works when the laptop doesn't. The softphone follows the salesperson to the truck and the bookkeeper home. Click-to-dial from your customer list (CRM) and voicemail-to-email work with both.

A rough guide to the mix:

• Reception, dispatch, shared areas and conference rooms: desk phone.
• Roles tied to a workstation (billing, scheduling, customer service): desk phone, softphone optional.
• People who split time between sites or home: softphone, plus a desk phone at their main desk.
• Owners and salespeople on the road: both.

One system that follows people between the office, the truck and the home office is its own post.

What this means in SW Washington

Around here the phone system in a typical office was rarely designed. It accumulated: a few old handsets, a couple of cells on the company plan, and a Wi-Fi network the phones share with the customers' tablets.

We design the mix instead. In Olympia that means a front desk that parks a call in one press. In Centralia it's a warehouse phone that still rings after the lights blink, and in Longview it's a clinic whose phones sit on their own network behind the firewall, with a written report that says so. We do that design work during a free on-site assessment, then quote it: no contract traps, and the Beat-Your-Bill guarantee (send us your current phone and internet bills and we will beat them, proven in the assessment). For the wider case, start with the real business value of a VoIP phone system.

The 8841s and 8851s come through VoIP PBX Express, our voice arm, refurbished to like-new with a lifetime warranty while your service is active. From the I-5 corridor to the Peninsula, book the assessment and we'll come to you.