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What to look for when changing to a VoIP telephone system

Writer's picture: Peter InstonPeter Inston

When choosing a business phone system, it's important to consider several factors to ensure it meets your company's needs. Here are the top 5 items to look for:

  1. Scalability: Ensure the system can grow with your business. Look for a solution that can easily accommodate increases in the number of users or locations without significant downtime or additional costs.

  2. Features and Functionality: Assess the features offered by the phone system and determine if they align with your business requirements. Common features include voicemail, auto-attendant, call forwarding, conferencing, mobile integration, and analytics/reporting tools.

  3. Reliability and Uptime: A reliable phone system is crucial for business operations. Look for providers that offer high uptime guarantees and have redundancy measures in place to minimize downtime.

  4. Cost and Pricing Structure: Consider the total cost of ownership, including upfront costs, ongoing fees, and any additional charges for extra features or usage. Compare pricing structures of different providers to find the most cost-effective solution for your budget.

  5. Integration and Compatibility: Ensure the phone system integrates seamlessly with your existing business tools and software, such as CRM systems, email platforms, and collaboration tools. Compatibility with both current and future technology can streamline workflows and improve productivity.

  6. Computer Telephony Integration (CTI)

    If your organisation uses a Customer Relations Management Package (CRM), or a computer based contact manager, you can often make life simpler by connecting the telephone system with the computer application. This can allow calls to be made directly from your chosen application, which saves having the numbers stored in two places, and makes it much quicker to find contacts and place calls, through “click to dial” functionality.


By evaluating these key factors, you can select a business phone system that meets your company's current needs while also allowing for future growth and flexibility.


Mistakes to Avoid When Replacing Your Telephone System

  1. Assuming that all systems have feature parity. While this is true of basic features such as Hold, with newer capabilities (especially Presence and Mobility) there are significant variations among products in terms of how much information is available and how it is presented to a user. It's crucial to see demonstrations of key features, and even better to involve business users who can provide feedback on which options work best for them.


  2. Not involving business users in the decision. When a VoIP telephone system is selected only by the IT team, the solution is often more technical and may not be as user-friendly. We have seen decisions that were based on what would be best for enhancing the IT team's resumes. Involving business users in the decision process results in a better decision in the end, although a larger group can slow the process. Business users often help to clarify what is truly needed and what is nice to have; they typically aren't swayed by the coolest new toys, and they don't pick a solution based on how it will impact their resume.


  3. One-Size-Fits-All Decisions. Most telephony solutions support a wide array of endpoints (big phones, small phones, softphones, wireless phones) and capabilities (Presence, Mobility, Collaboration). The variety can be overwhelming, so the options often get narrowed for manageability. However, most organizations have some percentage of power users who will benefit from higher-level "tools". The most successful implementations recognize these users and provide the tools to make them more effective.


  4. Ignoring the underlying infrastructure issues. This is really basic, but it happens all the time. Almost every new telephony solution has a significant VoIP component, and this means that the data switches supporting the IP or SIP phones must support VLANs and QoS.

    Furthermore, these capabilities must be configured and working on the network. If you want your phones to work during a power outage, your switches must also support Power Over Ethernet (POE) AND you must have sufficient UPS resources in your data closets to support the phones. Sometimes meeting these requirements can be quite costly, and care must be taken up front to assess the environment and determine how these factors will impact the overall cost of the project.


  5. Skipping the network assessment. A network assessment will determine if voice traffic will be impacted by any jitter, delay or latency issues that don't impact data traffic. Having such an assessment assures that the issues can be resolved BEFORE the voice traffic is impacted. The assessments do take some effort up front, but not as much work as diagnosing and fixing a problem after the fact.


  6. Not thinking of the long term. While the selection of the new solution is a big undertaking, once it's complete, you will have to live with the selection for several years. It's important to select the right partner for the journey, and it's really a two-part decision. Part 1 is the selection of the actual system/solution. Part 2 is the selection of the VAR/Integrator to install and support the system. The company you choose to support the system must be a capable partner who is experienced with the selected solution. Go beyond checking references; ask about the number of support personnel and their certifications. It can be very helpful to visit a vendor's support center to get a better idea of the scope of their operation. You don't want to be stuck without support if a key engineer leaves the company.



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