How to Set Up a Small Business Phone System in 9 Easy Steps

We’re long past the days of calling technicians to set up every landline phone or spending hours charging and activating cell phones for entire teams. Instead, setting up a small business phone system that uses Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is easier than ever. 

VoIP phone services let you use your business phone number through an internet connection, so you don’t need any physical phone lines or cables — or advanced tech skills. They’re also more cost-effective and flexible compared to traditional phone lines, which makes them affordable and convenient for small business owners.

Ready to get started with a VoIP service? Use this step-by-step guide to get your virtual phone system up and running.

How to set up a small business phone system

You don’t need much additional hardware to set up a small business phone system. Once you choose a VoIP app, all you need is an internet connection and a compatible device (like a computer or mobile phone).

Here’s how to set up a small business phone system using OpenPhone.

1. Activate your account

Completing your service provider’s signup process is the first step in setting up your business phone service. You’ll typically need to provide your contact information and payment information. During this process — or immediately after — you’ll be able to choose your business phone number.

When you sign up for OpenPhone, you can select any available US, Canadian, or toll-free number. Local numbers can help you establish a local presence in the markets you serve, while toll-free numbers ensure that international customers don’t have to pay to call you.

You can even set up a memorable vanity number (like 1-800-FLOWERS) when you opt for a toll-free number. With OpenPhone, you won’t have to pay for a separate toll-free plan — you can access 1-800 numbers on any of our small business phone plans.

You also have the option to port an existing number to your VoIP phone service. With OpenPhone, number porting is free. All you need to do is submit your port request in the OpenPhone app, and we’ll do the rest in five to seven business days (or up to two weeks in some cases).Once you’ve set up a new phone number with OpenPhone or ported your existing number, you can make free unlimited calls and text messages in the US and Canada and get affordable rates for international calls and texts.

2. Set your business hours

Provide clear expectations about when your company is open and available to take calls by setting up business hours on your office phone system. Make sure you have the right time zone selected when you do so.

Once you set your business hours on OpenPhone, you’ll have the option to create an away voicemail greeting. This message automatically plays for callers when they reach you outside business hours. That way, you inform callers in your away greeting and set expectations about when you’ll be back to return their call.

Want to reach customers via SMS? You can also turn on auto-replies. These automatically go out to people who call or text after hours. This gives you another easy to inform others when they can anticipate hearing back from you  and provide emergency contact details if necessary.What if you’re on vacation, in a meeting, or otherwise out of the office? Share access to your number so your team members can manage incoming calls on your behalf. Shared numbers with OpenPhone are accessible from any device, which means your team can take calls and send texts from anywhere with a WiFi connection.

3. Add a phone menu or other call routing options

No client wants to deal with endless call transfers and repetitive hold music. Also, no team member wants to spend valuable time on calls meant for someone else. Fortunately, many cloud phone systems offer call routing functionality so you can easily improve your call management process.

When you set up an auto-attendant (or IVR system) in OpenPhone, a phone menu greets your customers and lets them choose what they need help with. For example, they could dial ‘1’ to reach customer support or ‘2’ to reach your sales department.

Your virtual receptionist can route calls in six different ways:

• Let the call through to the originally dialed phone number where it will ring to everyone who has access to the phone number
• Forward the call to an OpenPhone number in your organization
• Forward the call to another US or Canadian number
• Send the call to a specific team member who shares the phone number
• Send the call to voicemail
• Play an audio message

4. Create a voicemail greeting

Professional voicemail greetings come in handy when you aren’t available to answer business calls. Instead of hearing a generic recording, your customers receive a friendly message that confirms they’ve reached your business (and tells them you’ll call them back soon).

Custom greetings can also help callers distinguish between different teams and team members if you have multiple business phone numbers. With OpenPhone, you can even change the language of your voicemail greetings to better serve customers in international markets.

OpenPhone offers four options for setting up voicemail greetings on both our web and mobile apps:

• Record your own audio
• Upload an existing voicemail file (in MP3 or WAV formats)
• Use text-to-speech to convert a voicemail script into a professional voiceover

Use OpenPhone’s free AI business voicemail greeting generator (available whether or not you have an OpenPhone account)

5. Enable integrations

A cloud-based small business phone system can save a lot of time for your team by integrating your business phone number with your favorite business tools. By connecting your software, you can streamline your workflows instead of constantly jumping from app to app.

OpenPhone lets you integrate with more than 7,000 third-party tools, including:

• Gong, to automatically transcribe your call recordings if you wish to house all your video and phone call transcriptions in one place
• Slack, to forward text messages, voicemail messages, and voicemail transcriptions to any Slack channel
• Email, to forward voicemails to email
• HubSpot, to sync contacts with your CRM in real-time and keep a record of customer interactions
• Salesforce, to automatically log voicemails, texts, and more
• Zapier, to automate texts and connect OpenPhone to even more apps, like Google Sheets, Typeform, and Calendly

6. Import contacts

Want to make calls with a quick tap? Just import your business contacts to your VoIP phone solution.

Many VoIP phone providers let you import all your contacts at once by preparing and uploading a CSV file. All you need to do is add their names, contact information, and other key details — no need to manually add each contact to your system one by one.

With OpenPhone, you can also add custom contact fields so you can track more data about your customers. Fields for dates, websites, and URLs make it easier for team members to filter and find the contacts they’re searching for.

7. Invite your team

Learning how to set up a small business phone system with more than one user is simple with the right phone service. For example, with OpenPhone, you can turn your business VoIP app into a multi-line phone system by sending email invites to your team members. All they have to do is accept your invite and download the OpenPhone app on their mobile phone, tablet, or computer. 

Each time you invite a team member to OpenPhone, you can assign them a brand-new phone number or let them pick their preferred number — one comes free with every user. You can also assign them to a shared number. As mentioned earlier, shared numbers allow your team members to collaborate on calls and texts so you can reduce response times and improve the customer experience. Business owners and admins can also enable international calling for specific phone numbers.

Once you invite someone to a specific phone number, you can determine how involved you want to be in their daily conversations. If you only need to monitor conversations, for example, you can mute call and text notifications so you don’t get bombarded with messages throughout the day.

There’s no limit to the number of users you can have on OpenPhone. Each user in your workspace comes with one phone number. And if you want to purchase additional phone numbers, local and toll-free numbers start at $5 per number per month.

8. Add more ways to streamline your communication workflows

As you can likely guess, the process of setting up a small business phone system looks different for every VoIP platform. Once you’ve decided on which phone platform to use, take some time to explore other built-in tools offered by your provider that can help you streamline your business communications.

Here are a few phone system features on OpenPhone that can benefit any small business or startup:

• Snippets: Save text message templates so you can fill in the blanks instead of typing out the same message multiple times per day.
• Scheduled text messages: Schedule SMS or MMS messages for the right times in the right time zones. You can always add the condition “Unless they message first,” which cancels your scheduled message and saves it as a draft.
• Click-to-call: Select OpenPhone as your default calling app to set up click-to-call on your desktop app, which will save you time on outbound calls.
• AI-generated call summaries: Use the magic of AI to quickly summarize past conversations and get a list of key information, like the speakers on each call, a time-stamped transcript, call duration, and more.

Keep in mind due to emerging regulations pushed for by the large US cell carriers, you’ll need to complete US carrier registration before you can text to any US number from a local phone number. If you have a toll-free number with OpenPhone, you must verify your toll-free number.

9. Specify your outgoing caller ID

The majority of Americans don’t pick up phone calls from unknown numbers. Setting up your caller ID can help you reach more clients with outgoing calls instead of getting sent straight to voicemail.

Your outgoing caller ID (or CNAM) can be up to 15 characters long and can only include letters, numbers, periods, commas, and spaces (it can’t have special characters like “+” or “!”). Your CNAM must be related to your business name or the name of the business contact on your US carrier registration. Otherwise, it may get rejected.

With OpenPhone, you can update your caller ID settings on both the web and desktop app. Changes are generally approved within 48 hours, so you can quickly establish your identity with customers.

Keep in mind that caller IDs aren’t available for toll-free numbers. Plus, they don’t always work for Canadian numbers, depending on your call recipient’s carrier.

Get started with OpenPhone, the best small business phone system

Now that you know how to set up a small business phone system, you can get up and running in just a few minutes using OpenPhone.

With OpenPhone, you won’t lose out on call quality or features that save you time. You can set up integrations, automations, and caller ID much faster than an installation team can set up a traditional phone system.

You can access your business number on any device using OpenPhone’s desktop, web, or mobile app. Then, you can start building better relationships with your customers from any location with an internet connection.Sign up for a free trial of OpenPhone and get started with the best VoIP phone system for small businesses within minutes.