How many phone lines does your business need?

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 take too many shortcuts.

To help you decide how many phone lines your business will need, consider the following:

• Most of your 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 at workplaces, you don’t need 50 phone lines. Instead, it would be wise to buy four lines for your office employees, plus one line for voicemail and one or two lines for your fax machines. Of course, you can vary this setting. 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 telemarketer with 25 employees, each of whom makes phone calls 8 hours a day, you should consider purchasing 35 or 40 lines just for the calls your employees make. It is also a good idea to add another two lines for faxes.

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 company has more than 15 employees, a more economical 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 likelihood that all employees are making or receiving calls at exactly the same time is low. Chances are, when one employee hangs up the phone to do a job, another will pick it up 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 as incoming faxes or are set up for your security system and are not currently being used, chances are you 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 due to a card failure that caused the loss of ten lines in your phone system. If after troubleshooting your hardware and you don’t find a problem, order additional lines to match the number of people affected by the line shortage. Maybe the Human Resources department hired 20 more people and they didn’t tell you. If during peak calling hours, 10 people in your office cannot get outside lines, request 12 more lines.

In short, the number of phone lines your business needs depends on the number of employees in the office (rather than 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.