Analyzing How Many Phone Lines You Need

Your decision about the number of phone lines your business needs will vary based on the specific profile of your company. Don’t be snowed into believing that you need one line for every employee. On the other hand, you shouldn’t cut corners. Here are a couple of scenarios to help you understand what you should consider in your decision:

• Tons of employees in the field: Say you run a construction company with 50 employees. Four of your employees work in the office and the rest of the crew is out on job sites. You don’t need 50 phone lines. You might purchase four lines for your in-house employees, one spare line for employees to pick up voicemail, and a line or two for your fax machines and be fine. You can noodle around with the configuration if you want. Maybe your construction company is very busy. You may need three or four lines for faxes.

• Tons of calls coming in and going out all day: You own a telemarketing company with 25 people who make calls 8 hours a day. Your employees also need to connect customers to a conference call with a verification service. You may need 35 or 40 lines just for the calls your employees make, and then 2 lines for faxes.

 Remember  As a basic rule, you should have one phone line for every employee who makes calls in your office — up to about 15 employees. If you have more than 15 employees, the least expensive option is to jump to a dedicated circuit that contains 24 phone lines. See the section later in this chapter, called, “Deciding whether to Get Dedicated or Stay Switched.”

 Tip  If your business is growing, here’s an interesting fact. You will need fewer lines per employee as you increase the number of employees in a standard office environment, not because employees will make and receive fewer calls (you can expect that they’ll probably make more calls), but because the statistical probability that everyone will be on the phone at the exact same time is pretty slim. You face a greater likelihood that one person will be hanging up and doing work as someone else picks up the phone to start another call.

To get a handle on your business’s actual call volume, you could pore over the itemized list of your phone calls to calculate the total number of calls active during peak times. Have fun — not! A more realistic exercise is to scan your phone bill and determine whether every phone number is being used. If you have several phone numbers that are not designated as inbound faxes or are lines for your security system and they have no usage, you probably have too many lines.

On the other side of the equation, if anyone (customers, employees, associates) ever complains of hearing a recording from the phone system that says that the “service is unavailable,” you probably need to open some more lines.

 Remember  Before you run out and buy a bunch of new phone lines, first ensure that the bottleneck in your phone system isn’t caused by another problem (maybe a card failed and you lost ten lines in your phone system because of it).

After validating your hardware, order additional lines to match the number of people affected by the shortage of lines. The Human Resources department may have hired on 20 more people you didn’t even know about. If 10 people in your office can’t get outside lines during peak times, order 12 more lines.