Transitioning to a Cloud Based Phone System
Intro and Overview
Looking to upgrade your business’ phone system to something more reliable, easy to use, and cost-efficient? While there are several options to choose from, you’re likely whittling it down to a premise-based or cloud-based phone system. There are clear disadvantages of running your phone system on-premise, while there are numerous advantages in hosting it in the cloud. Although it is hard for companies to let go of what they have on-prem, adopting the hosted cloud model is ultimately the way to go, especially considering the transition to a remote workforce environment.
Limitations of a premise based phone system
A premise based phone system is referred to as PBX (Private Branch Exchange) connected to a voice circuit called a PRI (primary rate interface) or traditional telephony architecture. For organizations that still have legacy PBX/PRI infrastructure in place and do not have access to sufficient bandwidth to sustain an IP phone, premise based may still be a comfortable choice in this scenario. In the majority of cases however, the cost-savings and productivity-boosting benefits of the cloud based phone system makes the choice easy. The limitations that a company encounters with keeping their legacy phone system are as follows:
● PBX/PRI is expensive to implement and upgrade, requiring a costly monthly service
● It can only be purchased in a 23 voice line unit, so even if you have 15 users on that PRI circuit, you are paying for the cost of 23 call paths.
● Very slow for scalability and flexibility. Any modifications that are required for the PBX/PRI infrastructure can take weeks to complete and will require a technician to come make the change on site.
What is a cloud based phone system?
A cloud based phone system is often referred to as UCaaS (Unified Communication as a Service). UCaaS, is the integration of several different communication platforms like instant messaging, SMS, voice, video, mobility (twinning/mobile app), video/web sharing, speech recognition, and more. UC is not a single product but rather a set of products bundled into one seamless platform allowing for a consistent user interface across several platforms. There are many added features on a UC platform which helps in both the user and customer experience; listed below are a few that stand out.
● Presence: Lets employees know which colleagues are available or on a call by having an indicator. Next to the name the indicator might show available, busy, do not disturb, or out of office. This helps with the transferring of calls.
● Softphone feature: UCaaS vendors, usually through broadsoft technology, are able to pair your softphone/mobile phone with your work extension through an app that they offer. This is especially beneficial for employees who don’t prefer desktop phones, for traveling/remote employees, or even seasonal employees. Through the softphone feature, employees can stay connected regardless of their location.
● SMS/IM: Short message service and instant messaging, these allow you to send texts to customers or multiple colleagues synchronously via your work number. “Research shows us that open rates for SMS are as high as 98% compared to just a 20% open rate for emails. Response rates are also much quicker with SMS rather than email.” https://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/email-marketing/2019/01/roi-showdown-sms-marketing-vs-email-marketing/
Advantages for moving to the cloud
There are some very important factors for moving your phone system to the cloud that need to be considered. The first key factor is cost savings. For an organization that needs to scale users up and down, add features, and perform long distance calling, UCaaS will be a large savings opportunity. In the UCaaS model, you only pay for what you use, so it is easy to add or subtract users on a month to month basis.
Better disaster recovery is the next important consideration. This is very important to consider regarding maintaining uninterrupted communications while reducing the risk of downtime. I mentioned the benefit of having mobility with users being able to work from anywhere with the softphone feature. The softphone also becomes critical for failover. For companies with a tight budget that do not pay for a redundant network, the softphone enables your employees to still make and receive calls even when the network goes down. In addition, UCaaS providers have multiple phone switches in the cloud so that your local phone numbers are registered in multiple phone switches at the same time. If a UCaaS voice switch goes down, your users will not drop calls as they will fail over to the second switch. This is referred to as a live live environment. This architecture would be very expensive for any business to replicate.
UCaaS solves the problem that many companies are faced with today which is BYOD (Bring Your Own Device). Whether an employee prefers a smartphone, laptop, iPad or tablet, UCaaS has connectivity to any employee device.
Lastly, in terms of future technology advancements, companies that are diving into more complex technologies like CCaaS or MS Teams, it is best to already have a UCaaS system in place. Learn how MS Teams integrates best with a UCaaS vendor here .
Partnering with Conectrix for this transition
Conectrix has contracts and relationships with the best in class UCaaS vendors and are able to evaluate which ones would be the best solution for your needs. Not all UCaaS vendors are created equally in terms of technology level, customer support, ease of implementation, and so on. We have spent many years working with these vendors and our valued customers, so we know who performs best in certain categories. Let us handle these aspects for your business and make the right introductions for you, rather than making your team spend valuable time doing this research. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us for assistance.