Your smartphone is great for taking photos, texting people, playing games, watching TikToks, videocalling people and, yes, even making phone calls. However, the native dialer on your phone doesn’t have all the features you might need or want if you’re trying to make a business call.
Softphones, or software phones, can be designed with critical business features, including multi-party videoconferencing, business voicemail, call recording and more.
The simple way to think of a softphone is this: It’s essentially a business phone app. Specifically, it can bring the power of an office desk phone to your computer or mobile device. You can download softphones from app stores for a wide array of devices, including smartphones, laptops and tablets. OnSIP offers customers free and comprehensive desktop apps and mobile apps.
Here are 5 business calling features in softphone apps that aren't built into your smartphone.
Essential Business Phone App Calling Features
1. HD Voice
You may have noticed the quality on your cell calls isn’t always great; sometimes you can barely hear the other person. According to ScienceABC, that comes down to the way cellular calls are handled, specifically using network lanes that carry many calls at the same time.
Phone calls made with Voice over Internet Protocol, also known as VoIP, are generally higher quality. They often use HD voice audio codecs. Granted, there are gradations in calls made over 5G or directly from Wi-Fi®. But when compared to standard cell-to-cell calls, cellular VoIP calls offer higher voice quality. Top softphones even offer other support for "wideband" codecs besides G.722, such as OPUS and SILK.
2. Call Recording
Call recording has many business benefits, from enforcing quality control to training and proving compliance with industry regulations. However, call recording isn’t typically built into smartphone interfaces. The only way to do this is a screen recording, but that’s inconvenient for business purposes since they’re not as easy to share or store. In addition, you need to manually enable it.
With a softphone app, you can easily set up call recording1 for all calls to your business line. The function is also usually part of the softphone dialer itself, so you don't have to burrow through several menus to enable it. Recorded calls are saved locally and you can access them either on the phone or in an app like iTunes.
3. Call Transfers
A large part of business calling involves routing callers to the proper destination within your company. Being able to use employee extensions to initiate transfers keeps you from having to redial the entire number, reduces fat finger dialing and saves time for the caller who's waiting on the other end of the line.
Smartphones don't come with call transfer functionality. That can only be accessed through a third-party app. See a trend? A softphone app makes it easy to initiate a transfer to a co-worker in your business Contact Directory. You can also choose between a blind transfer or an attended transfer. An attended transfer is when you place the caller on hold, call the transfer destination, relay a message to describe the incoming transfer, and then connect the on-hold caller to the transfer destination.
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4. Conference Calls
Your regular smartphone interface can allow three-way calls, which is fine for personal use but can be limiting for business calls. When you need to touch base with multiple team members, a softphone can offer additional capacity. Many softphones offer 5-way voice conferencing as well as multiple-party videoconferencing.
There are third-party apps that offer conference calling, but it can be a hassle to get everyone to download the app beforehand. Even worse if the app requires everyone to create an account. There’s also the chance the service limits the number of participants in the call, or how long you can meet, adding extra frustration to your business. That’s why having one app that does everything is so helpful.
5. Security and Encryption
Security for cellular phone calls has improved with the advent of both Voice over LTE and 5G, but just because security is better doesn’t mean it’s perfect. Security Research Labs reports that more advanced security tech has also opened up new avenues for hackers.
Native smartphone calls can not only be intercepted but hacked at various points. Many VoIP-based softphones rectified this weakness by adopting TLS, SRTP and ZRTP encryption.
Taken together, these encryption protocols protect softphone calls from illicit forms of snooping and surveillance. When compared to a native dialer, a phone app has the opportunity for end-to-end encryption that makes them a safer bet.
Mobile Apps: Your All-in-One Business Phone
While making personal calls with your smartphone’s native dialer can be a good experience, it can be woefully inadequate for business calls. Softphones give you a number of important, advanced business calling features in a single app. Otherwise, you would need to find and download a number of third-party apps to add functionality to your native dialer.
There are other benefits to using a softphone. First, it allows you to connect to your business phone system so that you can keep your business running even when you’re away from the office. Take advantage of your business’ directory, extension dial co-workers, see if members of your team are available or on a call, and get a robust feature set.
Even more important is that callers will see your business number, not your personal cell number, when you make or take calls on a softphone. You won’t have to share your personal number, allowing you to have a semblance of work/life balance. Not only will you not blur the lines there, you won’t blur the billing lines either. A business VoIP softphone can be billed as a business, not a personal, expense.
To learn more about the many advantages of using a business VoIP softphone on your mobile phone, call us at (800) 801-3381.
1. It is your responsibility to ensure you are complying with any applicable laws requiring consent prior to recording calls.