5 Tips for choosing an IP-PBX for Your Business

The key considerations for any company before investing in a new telecommunications platform (IP-PBX) are whether this investment is improving profitability, increasing productivity or reducing operational cost. It should enables your people to be more efficient and productive.

Technological development and growing business requirements nominate newer challenges of enterprise communications platforms. It is important to be able to provide a platform for communication in real-time, multimedia environment fit different working styles - office or remote employees, to make it easy to install and manage the IP-PBX platform, be flexible for adoption to new business needs.

Below, you'll find the TOP 5 Tips for choosing an IP-PBX for company (click ‘Open all’)

 

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Easy to use real time communications 

Studies shows that 90% of messages are read within 3 minutes, this is clearly showing how time sensitive and real time communications have become critical to business today.

Companies can benefit greatly from simple tools, like email plug-in application that allows users to access contacts without opening separate applications and be able click-to-call, click-to-SMS, click-to-IM (instant message) directly from their email applications. This is a very effective way to increase productivity and to decrease cost, especially if integrating with 3rd party internet calls providers.

Conferencing is also becoming the cornerstone of the real time communication. You will want to check the sound quality of the speaker on the desk phone as well as the microphone to ensure that your conference calls are audible for you and your participants (wideband audio, noise cancellation etc.) This is very important when you have frequent and multiple daily business conference calls.

In addition, surveys have shown that many company employees keep a paper directory document and use it everytime they want to call someone in their company. By the simple fact to integrate a directory in the telephone system and to provide a “call by name” feature, it will provide great improvement on daily productivity.

Investment protection

You may want to consider how requirements might change over time, and make sure you get a system that will scale with your future company size and needs. This could requiere some significant analysis.  But, it important to pre-plan your decision based on future expansions, and based on selecting a vendor that has been in the market for many years, which has shown that it will be able to support and maintain your system in the long term.

Look in to replacing with a system which offers high business value, low complexity and attractive pricing. Make sure you are selecting an easy to use and easy to maintain telephony system,

Don’t put too much significance on initial capiral expenditure and installation cost, look at the long term on-going cost, and do an analysis of the true real cost of ownership.  One of the significant factor that should be looked at is the “gain or loss” of revenue because of the telephony network. A ROI is measured by increased transactions, increased productivity, increase customer satisfaction and then by cost saving.

Mobility–BYOD–remote workers

The challenge for company is to balance the risk of opening the door to mobility while gaining the advantages brought by BYOD (bring-your-own-device). Many businesses are coming up with alternate solutions, for example, limiting functions and restricting access to company information.

Other capabilities providing users with Web applications can keep users in touch with their company anywhere using any compatible desktop web browser (from a smartphone, a tablet, a desktop computer or a laptop on Mac/Windows, etc...) whenever they have internet access, simplifying the maintenance and support.

Applications such as NFC (Near Field Communications) have been gaining traction with easy on-site mobility that delivers benefit from session shift between desk phone and their NFC-enabled smartphone.

More and more companies consider how mobile users and teleworkers can work from anywhere, anytime, whether from home, office or on the road. Providing the right solution could be complex, between a highly secure but expensive solution, or a simple solution with higher security risk. The analysis of the different solutions should be reviewed carefully and selected based on individual companies' needs.

Network Assessment

SMBs have a need to implement productivity-enhancing IT services with reduced costs. With that need, they face the complexity between network security, mobility, quality of services and class of services for local applications or cloud applications running on their data network.

A study done in 2015 “Network barometer 2015” looked at large installed based of mid to large customers showed surprising results:

  • 60% of network devices have at least one security vulnerability
  • 74% of wireless access points are still older models (802.11g and older) that don’t support a sound mobility and security strategy.
  • 53% of network devices are aging or obsolete

These points above show it is critical to review the status of your network infrastructure.

SMBs have to find the right balance between security risk, cost and advantages to open the network. Upgrading your network to the latest technology and latest software version is a critical element to make sure VoIP, UC (unified communications), and BYOD investments run smoothly based on your infrastructure.

Technology alone won’t solve your collaboration problems

It’s not what technology you’ve got, but how you use it! The important point is to align knowledge management systems (or any system for that matter) with how people actually work. The promise of tomorrow’s collaboration requires actively considering, designing, and fine-tuning both..

 Example of solution

Alcatel-Lucent OpenTouch is a communication system that is easy to install in every company's IT system. OpenTouch provides advanced communication that will help companies to connect their networks, people, processes. It’s also cost-optimized to keep expenditures under control.

IP-PBX implementation is one of the most important decisions of the company's IT infrastructure. That is why it is worth investing the time to plan and pre-evaluation of available solutions.

Discuss with our consultants how to improve your company's communications platform. Free consultation

 

 


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