What UCaaS features matter most for small businesses?

Suppose a six-person office has one main number. Two people answer most calls, and the other four pick up when those two are busy. For this office, a missed call can be a lost customer, so the phone system's first job is to keep that call moving toward a person.

A hunt group does most of that work. A call to the main number rings a group of phones, either all at once or one after another, which is called sequential ring. Whoever answers can transfer the caller to the right colleague. Call park is the looser version of a transfer. It holds the caller in a shared spot so anyone in the office can pick the call up from their own phone.

Forwarding covers the person who's out, and voicemail takes the call that still finds nobody. Between them, these features give an unanswered call in this office somewhere to go.

Atlantech Online's UCaaS page shows how one provider splits them. It advertises two lines. The Business Line starts at $12 per user per month, and its card lists hunt groups, sequential ring, call forwarding, transfer, and park and pickup, with unlimited local and domestic long-distance calling. The Premium Line starts at $18 per user per month, and its card lists voicemail, conferencing, collaboration and a softphone.

For this office, the split matters. Hunt groups, forwarding, transfer and park are named on the $12 card, while voicemail, which we put in the first group, is named on the $18 card.

For our six people, that's $72 a month on the Business Line or $108 on the Premium Line, if every user is on the same line and the quote comes in at the starting rate. Those totals cover the per-user charge only. The quote settles whether a Business Line carries voicemail or whether this office is pricing Premium Lines. It also confirms the term, whether an office can mix line types, and any other charges.

An auto attendant is the recorded menu that answers and routes the caller. A call queue holds callers in line until someone is free. A small office can need either, both or neither.

Microsoft's overview of auto attendants and call queues for Teams Phone describes what each one does. An auto attendant sends a caller to a person, a queue, an outside number or voicemail based on the option they choose. It can route differently during business hours, after hours and on holidays. A call queue, in Microsoft's words, is like a waiting room, where callers hold while calls go to the people assigned to the queue.

Our six-person office doesn't need a menu to sort its callers. Anyone who answers can help or transfer, and a hunt group already finds that person. The menu becomes useful when callers want different people for different reasons, such as sales and service. It also earns its place for the hours rule alone. A caller at 7 p.m. can hear the opening hours and reach voicemail, and nobody has to change a setting on the way out.

A queue is worth having when callers are better off holding than leaving a message. That takes steady call volume and people whose job is to answer. If you set one up, look at what it does when it can't deliver the call. Microsoft lists three cases its queues can redirect: no agents are signed in, too many callers are waiting, or one caller has waited too long. If our whole office signs out for lunch, that's the first case every day.

Teams queues have no after-hours or holiday routing of their own, so Microsoft recommends putting an auto attendant in front of the queue. That describes Teams, and it's a behavior to check on any system with queues. Atlantech's page names auto attendant, ACD groups and voicemail transcription among its calling features. ACD stands for automatic call distribution, the function behind a queue. The quote confirms which line they come with.

If queues and their reporting turn into the center of the business, the need has changed. Atlantech's page says UCaaS supports individuals and teams, while a call center's queuing, routing and reporting requirements are substantially different. It names that second category CCaaS, which we set beside the others in the difference between CCaaS, UCaaS and CPaaS.

A softphone is a calling app that stands in for a desk phone. How much it matters depends on where your people take calls.

If all six sit at desks with phones on them, the app is a convenience for the day someone works from home. If the owner spends the week on job sites, the app is the phone. Calls to the main number can ring a mobile, and calls back to customers made from the app come from the business line.

Atlantech's page lists mobile apps for Android and iOS and says its softphone's calling features are tied to the business dial plan, which is the office's map of extensions and routing rules. The softphone is named on the Premium Line card. So where people take their calls decides which card to price.

The Premium Line card also lists conferencing and collaboration, and the page describes video meetings, instant messaging and file sharing. Their value to a small business depends on what it already pays for. An office that holds meetings in a suite it has no plan to leave gains a second meeting tool.

An office paying for a separate meeting service and a separate chat service has a different sum. If the new service covers what people use those tools for, and the subscriptions can be ended, their cost counts as savings against the higher rate.

Atlantech and Nextiva draw this line in different places, so their plan names don't compare. Nextiva's pricing page shows a Core plan at $15 per user per month. Its card lists voice, business SMS, video meetings, screen and file sharing, call routing, team chat and a mobile app. That price is Nextiva's annual small-business rate. The page limits it to new customers with 1 to 100 employees who sign a paid agreement of 12 months or longer.

Texting is one more item for the list if your customers text you. Atlantech's page mentions unlimited calling and texting nationwide among its features, and Nextiva puts business SMS on its entry card.

So the comparison that works starts from your own calls. Write down what happened to a week of them: who called, who should have taken the call, and what the caller got when that person was out. Then check each plan against that list before you compare per-user rates. The plan worth pricing is the one that covers the list, because those calls are the reason your office is buying a phone system.