To learn more about the costs of business phone systems, download our free eBook The Essential Guide to Business Phone System Pricing.
The one-time investment on handsets is fairly easy to estimate. If you are purchasing more than 20 or so handsets, you'll want to inquire about bulk discounts. The more popular models of handsets fall in the following price ranges.

So, for example, a softphone can combine a telephone conversation with text chat and screen sharing, which means a conversation between two employees can seamlessly add more participants, handle private text chats between those participants while the call is still going on, and extend to a collaboration session in which the group shares screens, documents, and data—no prep, no reserved lines, just button clicks. In the case of a CRM integration, the system could recognize the customer's phone number or some other identifier and automatically pull up that record for the technician or salesperson answering the call. It can even alert a manager to monitor the call if it's an especially important client.
The fastest and easiest way to program and record the automated attendant feature of your phone system is to write a script on a word processing program. Select a person to record the script who has a friendly voice, someone who can speak without stuttering or hesitating and can pronounce and annunciate each word and name clearly.