Challenge Two: Maintenance and Usability

The telephone service industry used to sell business phone systems knowing that it was such a specialized device they would be back time and time again for all sorts of add-on work. If someone needed a phone moved from one desk to another, they would say, “Sure, we can do that for you for $150.” Or, if someone needed to assign a phone to a new employee, that would be another $150. If a customer wanted to alter how or where their calls were directed during holidays, the phone company would say, “We can send someone onsite to set that up for you for $75/hour.”

Sadly, in today’s marketplace, there are still voice vendors and manufacturers who operate under a similar process. Administration menus are difficult to access or not available to the end customer, keeping them from being able to make quick updates to their system and requiring them to be reliant on their telecom vendor. The legacy model works great for additional revenue for your installer and the manufacturer, but it’s not a wonderful choice for most businesses.

In a world where mobile apps, web services, and click-to-build web-based applications are the norm, it makes sense that most business-critical applications, appliances, or servers follow suit with graphical user interfaces (GUIs) that are designed to ease administration and guide even non-tech personnel to make simple moves, adds, changes, and more.

Why should you bother with self-service and internal (or partner provided) maintenance? Aside from the fact that new features, functions, and enhancements are often available to phone systems these days, it can save your business countless hours of missed opportunities waiting for a vendor to respond or resolve an issue. And every savvy business manager and owner knows that time is money.

The most cost-effective phone system solutions are those that utilize smart GUIs through a website or dedicated application so that even non-telephony managers can easily make simple changes to the way the phone system operates. Re-assigning a phone or extension from one desk to another, for example, shouldn’t take a team of engineers or a few hours of wait time for a vendor to become available to make the change. Unified Communications (UC) solutions do require experts to design and initially configure, however, the day-to-day operations and common chores that can nibble at your bottom line should be easily managed in-house.

Conclusion

A great example of a UC solution designed to be easy to administer is our very own Switchvox platform. From the easy-to-navigate, browser-based interface to the built-in help system, it makes it clear that the nickel-and-dime vendor support model is outdated and ultimately unnecessary for most business solutions.

In the final part of this blog series, we’ll explore why choosing between cloud and on-premise phone system deployments is a huge factor in today’s Unified Communications buying process and how choosing the correct solution deals with more than just the upfront and ongoing costs.

For 8 specific tips about finding a phone system that is easy to use and maintain, check out this blog.

When finding a new phone system (or making any IT purchase), the underlying question you’re trying to answer is: “Is this the right solution for my company?”

There are three main challenges that every business should overcome when replacing their phone system. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing a three-part blog series addressing these three challenges in order to help your company thrive and grow by utilizing the tools in today’s Unified Communications (UC) solutions. Today we’ll address the first challenge: features and functions.

Challenge One: Features Functions

Feature parity among UC solution providers has never been closer. With each vendor primarily offering the same types of features and functions, how you access those functions can be monumentally different.  For example, many vendors bundle certain packages together and charge extra for them. Or, they offer a stripped down version of a package and charge upsell fees in order to activate the full feature.

Let’s say you run a dental practice and you would like to have six staff members making outbound calls to patients for follow up and scheduling. Those same six staff members also receive inbound calls from patients looking to reschedule appointments, confirm appointment times, and inquire about the duration of their procedure. It might not be a traditional call centre or helpdesk, but in order to fully optimize how quickly and effectively patients and staff are able to communicate in this way, call centre features are really necessary.

Some UC solution providers may charge extra to include call centre type features. Or, some may include a base package with a single call queue with up to five agents (staff members) and charge you to add additional queues or agents. Others, like Digium’s own Switchvox UC system, include it without licensing limitations in their base product.

So, what’s the underlying point about challenge one? It’s not just about whether a phone system has a feature you’re looking for, it’s also about how you access it and how much you must pay for the privilege to fully utilize it. For a small set of features, maybe an add-on cost is not a large factor. But, if you need to add multiple features, these fees can add up more quickly than you might suspect.

Conclusion

The most cost-effective solutions are those that include the features and functions your company could use to improve its business processes, streamline your call functions, and maximize the benefits to both your employees and callers alike.

To help narrow down the phone system features your company needs, download the New Phone System Checklist now!

Stay tuned for part two of this blog series where we’ll explore Challenge Two: Maintenance and Usability.

Your phone system is the lifeline between your company, your customers, and your employees. That’s why reliability and quality of service are essential parts of your communications network. There are certain aspects of your current network that need to be considered to ensure that you are capable of delivering high-quality voice, video, and UC features to your office. Below, you will find tips and tools, including a comprehensive VoIP network test, to help you understand your network and determine whether or not it’s fully ready to take advantage of a hosted phone system.

Read More.

With Switchvox 6.6, every user can be paired with up to 5 total Digium devices, all under one license.   This allows every person in your company to utilize not just a single desk phone, but perhaps, multiple handsets at different locations (for example, you can use a Digium phone at home, in the office and the softphone when you’re on-the-go). And with the latest releases of Switchvox softphone for Android and iOS, with updated interfaces to match our award-winning D80 touchscreen phone, taking your business calls with you on-the-go has never been this simple or cost-effective.

Now, the power of Switchvox extends beyond one-to-one and truly enables your workforce to work where they want, when they want, and how they want.

Switchvox also now comes with LDAP / Active Directory integration for authentication.  Use your Windows domain or Active Directory password to access your web user suite, or to log into the administrator suite.  It’s one less password to remember and one more way that Switchvox continues to make Unified Communications easy.

This version of Switchvox also offers a whole host of other small upgrades and enhancements for the best Unified Communications experience.  For full information on Switchvox 6.6, including important information to read before upgrading, visit our FAQ.

As always: Switchvox is not just a phone system, it’s a better way to communicate.

A basic requirement for VoIP

Before you can experience all the benefits of a VoIP solution that utilizes a SIP Trunk (or VoIP Trunk), you first need to make sure your Internet speed is adequate.

Instead of using traditional telephone lines, VoIP Trunks, also known as VoIP Circuits or SIP Trunks use the Internet to make and receive calls, so Internet speed is one of many crucial factors in determining how pleasant your experience will be.

In this article, we’ll go over what Internet specifications you’ll need in order to ensure that your phone system makes a seamless transition to a VoIP provider.

How Internet speed and bandwidth affect your business

You may have noticed that if you try to do too many things online at the same time – like browsing the web, watching videos, or downloading files – your Internet speed can start to drag.  Your internet speed, also known as bandwidth, is delivered as a set amount of speed at any one time and when you try to do too many resource-heavy activities at once, you can quickly exceed the allocated amount.

This may be a simple inconvenience when it happens to your home Internet, for example, your video may take a little longer to load, but ultimately, it gets the job done.  With a real-time voice application, however, as is the case with a VoIP Trunk, having a lack of bandwidth can cause poor call quality and dropped calls.

When taking into consideration that phone calls are still the primary channel for customer communications (source), it’s especially important that your business does not let a lack of bandwidth affect your customer-facing communications platform. A poor phone experience can have a negative impact on your brand.

In order to avoid bandwidth-related call-quality problems you have to determine how much bandwidth you’re going to need to support a new VoIP phone system, as well as your existing internet-usage requirements.

How much bandwidth do I need for a VoIP phone system?

Bandwidth is one of a series of important aspects of your VoIP phone system setup that is critical for success.  To help you determine how much bandwidth you will need to support a new phone system, use can use the following equation:

G711 – A common VoIP call protocol requires approximately 64kbps

Using G711, you can have approximately 12 concurrent calls for each 1Mbps of bandwidth.

So, if your company needs to support 120 concurrent calls, you’d need 10Mbp service

You’ll want to keep in mind that the amount of bandwidth you require is above and beyond your standard internet usage. If you are an office with a 10Mbp Internet connection, looking to support 120 concurrent calls, you would have no bandwidth left over to do things like browse videos, check email, or stream music.  Therefore, you would need to increase your connection speed to account for standard usage, plus additional voice calls overhead.  Additionally, other voice protocols can use more or less bandwidth, so you will want to check with your phone system manufacturer to see which protocols your system will use.

Quality is more than just raw speed

The quality of your bandwidth or internet connection also plays a part in how well your VoIP Trunk will function.  Imagine that each call you try to make is a car.  Your car/call is trying to make it from your home to your nearest city.  To do so, it has to hop on the highway.  How many lanes the highway has is essentially bandwidth.  The more lanes you have, the more cars (or calls) that can get to the city.  But what happens during rush hour, or when there’s an accident on the highway, or a lane closure.  These unexpected delays cause your car to slow down and delay your arrival.  The same happens with your voice-calls and internet traffic with what is called latency and jitter.

If your internet provider and VoIP Trunk provider do not account for these potential delays, you could experience equally poor call quality.  Just like you would to avoid being late to your meeting, your VoIP provider and internet carrier can adjust for potential delays and ‘leave earlier’.  From a technical standpoint, you don’t have to know how it happens, however, you do want to ask the question, how does (my system, my trunk, my internet carrier) handle jitter and latency for voice traffic.

An easy way to prep for VoIP services

While some of this may seem overly technical, there are pre-built tools online to help you in your journey.  You don’t need to be a technology expert or even a voice/telephone administrator to see if your company and your internet connection are ready to support a VoIP service.

To test your current Internet speed, for free, check out our VoIP Network Test tool. It will provide you with an easy-to-read report that will help you determine whether your services will support a Voice platform, or whether you should consider an upgrade.  

The smallest (in stature only) on-premise appliance that Digium recently released, the Switchvox E510, might be small but there’s no doubt about it.  It slays the competition.

Especially in the lower side of the SMB spectrum, small businesses have had difficulty finding an affordable phone system that isn’t limited in functionality, features, or usability.

Choosing a Phone System That Performs for Your Business

In the past, the “choices” of these budget-savvy business shoppers have been generally relegated to buying a phone system that is cheap, but as a trade-off you:

• lose functionality,  such as the ability to work receive calls remotely, just as if you’re in the office
• accept limits on features, such as a only being able to use a ring-all call queue or hunt group that can only have 5 phones in it and has no options for things like custom music on hold, or announcements for those waiting
• get stuck with phones that are hard to use, interfaces that are not intuitive, or have a system that is not manageable by non-VoIP telephony experts.

Powerful and Affordable

But that’s all changed.  Just introduced on August 1, and now available, is the more powerful Switchvox E510 appliance. When it’s bundled with the award-winning Switchvox software, small businesses get all the enterprise-class, fully-featured, and advanced (yet simple) functions of its powerful enterprise brethren, but at a cost even the smallest of businesses can afford.  And though it’s an appliance that can essentially fit in the palm of your hand, it’s powerful enough to let your business enjoy multi-tiered Auto-Attendants, Visual Voicemail, Mobility options (such as advanced Call Rules), softphones and Call Queues with full functionality.

If you haven’t seen it already, check out our overview video that features the E510 as well as the other appliances in our new lineup. Let us show you how Switchvox can reinvigorate and optimize how your business communicates.