How does a phone system upgrade play into a company’s overall communication infrastructure?
You really do have to package all of that together. There are some areas of convergence that are critical, one of which is bandwith. Obviously as a business grows, you’re going to have more employees who are going to be doing more things via the Internet. Sooner or later, you probably are going to require additional bandwith. So having two different vehicles to deliver voice and Internet connectivity is going to be a problem. You’re going to want to converge those two into a voice over IP system so that you can maximize your investment in that Internet connectivity and use it for all of your voice communication.
In the operational aspects, this is especially critical because for most businesses, in most cases, the phone is the most critical customer-facing component of your business. The effectiveness of your voice transfer system can really change clients’ perception of your entire business. So when you’re having phone issues or problems, it’s a customer-facing problem and needs to be addressed quickly.
On the employee side, it’s going to save time. Having one address book for all of your communications, having one location for all of your e-mail and voice-mail messages, is probably going to make your employees more effective.
How does a company choose what features are right for them in a communications system?
That is going to be a decision that is unique to your organization. But now, some of the features and how they’re packaged into systems are different than what they were in the past.
It used to be that you were buying a mechanical switch, and it had a layer of software that could utilize that switch in different ways, but today all of the new phone systems are server-based. All the functionality is software-based, so the ability of the manufacturers to include more functionality into the base or core package has definitely brought those costs down. Whatever your buying power is, you’re going to get more from the new system than you could have ever achieved trying to upgrade your legacy system, because of the way it’s structured.
So even if you are just two or three years into an analog system that seemed like a good option for you at the time, it needs to be re-evaluated because of the dynamics of the new feature sets.
How to reach: ANRO Inc., (800) 355-2676 or http://www.anro.com/
