Know your team's availability with phone presence.

Phone presence is the status of a user's ability to communicate on the phone, instant message, or in-person. The status is set automatically as well as manually. Typical statuses include: available, on a call, unavailable (do not disturb), or offline.

The status is displayed on authorized users' desk phones and softphone applications.

To monitor the status of multiple business phone lines, you will want to consider the use of a sidecar. A sidecar is a hardware device that attaches to your desk phone. It displays extensions along with each of their statuses. This is seen in large department stores as well as office managers.

A more robust way exists for power users to monitor the status of multiple VoIP extensions. The use of the Unity Dashboard provides powerful functionality to route incoming calls effectively.

Employees connected to a business phone system can download and install a VoIP app to their smartphone for staying in touch with coworkers. With an app, they can indicate they can answer calls, use instant messaging, and join conference calls.

Nextiva users can download the NextivaONE App on the App Store and Google Play.

The most common use-case for setting up phone presence is for an administrative assistant. They need up-to-the-second presence status of their executive's phone. They are entrusted with this information to minimize interruptions. Another top example is when a front office needs to see the status of others at a glance before they transfer a call.

With more and more users working remotely, employees use business phone apps to stay in touch. Within those apps, presence information is displayed intuitively, even on cell phones.

A more industrious use of phone presence is found in VoIP call center software for supervisors. These offer fine-grained control to managers to view all on-going calls, agent status, and supervisor tools to monitor or join calls as desired.