Basic Telephone Handset Features — Telephone Systems.com.au - Australia's Telephone Systems Resource

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Basic Telephone Handset Features

The selection of your telephone handset is important as it is the interface to the functionality of the telephone system. Most manufacturers have a range of telephone handsets that are differentiated on the basis of:

Number of fixed and programmable keys for line and extension appearances or for commonly used features. These keys often incorporate multi colour LED to identify status of calls on their own or other handsets or if a feature has been activated. The fixed functions usually include the commonly used hold and transfer keys

The LCD display which usually provides information on calls in progress such as the name and extension of an internal caller, the duration of call, and in some cases, caller ID. It often provides an interactive menu to access the telephone system features. There are now phones with large LCD displays

Speakerphone capability. Speaker phones can be half-duplex, which means that only one person on the call can be heard at a time, or full-duplex, which lets both parties talk simultaneously, like a regular phone. Some phones also have a 'listen only' mode for speaker phone, which is useful for monitoring a conference call or while on hold.

Although having the right features is important, even more critical is making sure they are easy to access. Because most employees devote very little time to learning how to use a phone system, you should make sure that using the most common functions is extremely simple and intuitive and this is why the selection of the telephone handset is so important.