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THE NEXT GENERATION IN BUSINESS PHONE SYSTEMS
By George Bardissi, President Bardissi Enterprises
Are you ready for the next generation phone system? As many
industries have already discovered, the phone industry has
gone networked based. What do I mean by that? I mean that the
connection between computer networks and telephones has been
bridged! So what do you need to know?
First, all of the features that a regular PBX analog system
has are already integrated in a network based phone system.
These features include but are not limited to multiple
phones with individual extensions, the ability to transfer
calls from one phone to another, voicemail, auto attendants,
paging and so on. Some people might ask what more could you
want out of a phone system? Well, let’s find out.
Network based phones systems run off of a technology called
VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol). Many people have
probably heard of this term before. This technology is very
powerful and here is why. Some of the added functionality of
a network based VOIP system takes a phone system to a whole
new level to bring you features such as the following:
You can gain greater mobility by being able to use your
mobile phone as an extension. Wait, what does that mean? It
means exactly what I said above; imagine someone calling
into your company line and dialing your extension. That call
will get forwarded right to your cell phone. Now on top of
that, what if you need to transfer that person while on a
call, on your cell phone, to someone else in your
organization? Your cell phone, while receiving calls from
your office phone system, acts like a regular phone sitting
on your desk in the office… meaning you have the
functionality to transfer calls to someone else in the
office by just hitting a few keys on your cell phone!
Let’s say someone calls your office and leaves you a
voicemail on your company line. What happens if you’re out
on the road all day? Some people call the office multiple
times a day to check their voicemail. Well, with network
based phone systems, you can have the system send an email
to you with the voicemail attached to it so that you can
have your email and your voicemail all in one spot!
What else can I get from a network digital phone system?
Well what if I have employees working out of home offices or
individual locations? No problem! You can take a handset and
program it to connect to your office phone system over the
Internet. Not only will all calls to and from that phone, in
a remote location to the office, be free but due to the VOIP
technology, that person in the remote location will be able
to accept incoming calls and make outgoing calls from that
phone as if they were sitting in your office while the
person on the other end of the line won’t know the
difference!
I am not even done yet! Let’s say you have multiple offices
with several employees across different areas. If you
install a phone system in each office you can interconnect
each phone system and they will work seamlessly with each
other over the internet. The entire system will simulate one
large phone system in which all the phones will work with
each other! Ok what does that mean? Let’s say you have an
office in Philadelphia and another office in New York both
with a networked phone system. You could simply press any
extension number from either office and the system would
talk to each phone as if the phone where in one location!
Many of these systems also give you an on screen display on
your pc on top of your actual phone that gives you even
greater call functionality such as recording any phone call
you may be on at any particular moment! You could even have
the system automatically record all phone calls going in and
out of your phone system. Even better, you have the ability
to have detailed call statistics and reports from your
system at any time! These features are usually automatically
built into your system at a fraction of the price it would
be to add it to a traditional analog PBX phone system.
There are two more features definitely worth talking about.
The ability to monitor phone calls is very important for
many companies in order to analyze the customer experience
and interaction with their company. Networked based phone
systems will give a supervisor the ability to listen to any
phone call without any party knowing, coach an employee
during a live phone call which means a supervisor could say
something to an employee on the phone with a client without
the client hearing anything, or barge into a phone call that
may have gotten out of hand so that both parties on the
phone could hear what’s going on!
The last feature that I felt was worth talking about was the
ability to conference call! Have you ever had to have more
than 3 people in a conference call but that was the most
your regular phone allowed for? Network based phone systems
can come with the ability to have multiple party conference
calling. Most times you would have to distribute a
conference code and even a conference password so your
client could call a number and conference in with you. With
some digital phone systems you have that ability already to
conference anywhere from 12 to 30 people, depending on your
system, without having to pay for another service to provide
the ability for you to do so with the same conference code
technology!
It is amazing where technology is going and how far things
have advanced. I must say that computer and network
technology has really given many industries solutions and
avenues to grow well past their previous landmarks and
create new and exciting functionality which can be added to
existing business network solutions currently on the market.
In this particular case, network technology has taken
something that was very basic and expensive and provided a
cost effective and robust solution. If your company is in
the market for a phone system I would highly recommend
looking past analog and going straight to a networked VOIP
based system.
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