Business phone systems can be very confusing. There are so many options, acronyms and tech talk out there.

With more than 15 years in the business phone game, I have come up with a simple plan for business owners to follow when facing this challenge.

Start off with an outline of the features and capabilities you and your business require. Consult the different teams, departments and job functions and build a prioritised list of system features in categories.

Act it out.

“Put yourself in the phone call.” Close your eyes and imagine you are a phone call to your business. Try to define how you would like to be treated.

• Would you like to speak to a real person or press 1 for Sales, 2 for Accounts etc.?
• How long are you prepared to wait if nobody is available?
• Would you like to listen to information about the business or would you prefer some nice music while waiting?
• If no one is available would you like your voicemail to be emailed?

Business phone features have changed a lot over the past few years. With the introduction of Cloud Phone Systems, the feature set is huge and can give your business the edge in productivity. Here are some phone solutions that can help streamline your business communication and give your callers a better experience.

• Work from anywhere, anytime – Enable your staff to work from anywhere with the option of a desk phone or softphone on a PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad or Android device.
• Call recording – Great for call quality control and compliance for sales and support teams.
• Multiple Offices, One Phone System – No longer do you need a phone system for each office. A Cloud PBX enables all your sites to be one phone system.

Determining what you need will make your discussions with business phone system providers faster, more productive and ensure a better outcome for your company.

small business phone systems Australia a discussion point.

More on hosting..

 

Hosted -PBX

Hosted-PBX or cloud-hosted phone systems, I believe, are the way of the future.

The reasons for my statement is pretty simple really it comes down to the three basic premise
of Capital, Cost and maintenance. You save on everyone.

There is little or no upfront costs with a phone system unless you wish to purchase or upgrade handsets and even then it is limited. You do need basic cabling to each handset and back to your internet connection but there it can stop.

This means that you pay a monthly amount that covers all the hardware you need, and a cost that is quite low.

The cost of operation is generally about half what the average consumer is currently paying with bundles that include Local, national and calls to mobile. This really helps in budgeting and monthly expenditure with no great surprises with large bills.

A large burden in the past has been those telephone tech call-outs every time you need a basic change.
Call out fee, an hourly rate in the hundreds is a cost you can eliminate altogether.

Most services on a hosted-PBX are changed from a dashboard or a call to your hosting company in Australia that is done live.

Where is the downside to this?

You must use VOIP access and perhaps you have heard bad reviews from the past. Well, two things apply here, because of the NBN you have no choice but to change to VOIP access at some time in the near future. Because speeds have generally increased this problem has been eliminated. The hosting providers have also improved and now you get a seamless service.

What do you do with your old system and handsets? Sell them on Ebay because they will fall in price as demand is no longer there. Second-hand systems did have a buying public sometimes just for the cards but that is rapidly declining. Anything over a few years old is outdated already so make your mind up soon.

You can combine Voice and data on one NBN channel or even have two services where large data download is required. Data does compromise Voice but saying that voice uses little space. As an example on an NBN 25 plan, you could run about 20 consecutive voice calls without compromising quality. Most small businesses stay around maximum calls at one time of say 3-4 calls at a time taking up less than 20% of the channel use.

The other point with the NBN is you can up your speed to cover issues at any time.

The NBN has changed.

The NBN has changed our thinking on both voice and data and it is well worth familiarising yourself on the changes. I have reported on this here.

No capital, save monthly and limited or no IT cost really puts this in the bag.
A hosted-PBX is your future so do it now whilst competition is active and prices are great.

Peter Hanley

1800116116

Engin NBN options

 

Engin NBN options

Many companies in Australia are offering a hosted phone system including Engin NBN options.

Engin is owned and operated by the M2 group, a large telecommunications carrier that joined and renamed as Vocus. They include Amcom NBN, Nextgen, dodo and several other entities. Vocus are probably the fourth biggest carrier in Australia and like all take over entities suffer from service lag when trying to amalgamate the many purchases into one group.

Engin NBN is the low-cost provider of the group concentrating on the business area.

Hosted phone systems

Hosted phone systems have many providers and like any business, there are the good ones and the
not so good ones.

I have had contact with many of these and formulated a checklist that I would use to select a carrier.

That checklist would include at least the following items.

• Price. This is the first on the list but last in the criteria of selection. Why? Probably because sometimes you get what you pay for. I suggest you look for a fair price, not necessarily the cheapest.
• Size. The second on the list but again I caution against picking on size. The marketing bucks of the big four do generate a level of interest that may not be tied to delivery. I have had as much, if not more issues with the larger entities.
• Features. Do a plan for your business and the features you require then check that they can be supplied with your carrier of choice.
• Bundled options. This is important hence we need to elaborate more on this.a) While Local and National calls are included in most bundles make sure than Mobile are as wellb) Calls to 1300/1800 numbers at a fixed rate. Some will charge on a timed basis.c) Your telephone number, line fee and handsets can all be included in the one bundle.

  d) You will pay less with a term contract as the carrier gets a return over the period. I believe it is also in your interest because you make a decision and forget it. You are not going into hours of debating a better plan every time someone makes an offer.

• Customer service. This is number one on the list. Australian call centres rock, trying to speak Indian or Thai sometimes comes with a lack of understanding and creates issues.
• Access to a dashboard application for live changes.
• On-hold, call forwarding, conferencing are a few of the features you will also need.
  

  What to do now?

• I run a business in the Telecoms area so I have a good understanding of the needs of small business. As a result, it has taken me some time to select a carrier that met the list of demands that I consider important.

In conclusion, I do not hold criticism over any of the carriers in the market, and there are many but I do suggest that you choose wisely. As a result, my suggestion on a great pick is available at Fig-Solutions my site as a portal to a product that will meet or achieve any demand you have.

Peter Hanley

1800 116116

Cloud hosted phone systems.

Can you have a cloud-hosted phone system?

The answer is a yes, definitely so and it will be normal in a few years.

In Australia, with the NBN roll-out, all telephone calls will need to be over the internet
as we do away with the fixed copper network. So basically you are forced into a cloud environment.

The question should be how do you connect to the cloud for telephone calls?

The current situation is that you share your telephone network with the internet. On your incoming line, you have a splitter that separates the two services and share a common line.
Both have an equal opportunity at bandwidth.

In the new NBN system, you have

you have an internet (or data) connection and share with voice. Data has precedence over voice so over using data effects Voice.

The good news is that you can have a lot more bandwidth and speed to compensate.

Now you have a great understanding of this subject let’s look at Phone systems.

Old style phone systems need an analogue adapter into a modem or router and into the system.

Newer phone systems will need a digital card and connect using VOIP

Others may use a SIP connection using adaptors.

Or Use a phone system in the cloud and all you need on site is handsets.

Don’t get to hung up on this, if the phone system is more than about 8 years old ditch it.

The same will apply if your upgrade is too expensive to re-card the system.

Now the choice is down to two.

1. a current system VOIP compatible from a leading manufacturer. Purchase hardware, have it
   installed and ongoing maintenance by Tech call out.
2. A cloud-based system. Pay a flat monthly fee that includes handsets, maintenance and most calls with all the updates done by you.

Pretty unfair choice.

Phone systems will be a thing of the past within a few years as the growth of hosted systems take over the market

The NBN allows sufficient bandwidth to run both for any business up to say 5 handsets. For larger organisations, we sometimes recommend two services one for data and one for voice remembering that Data is king and can affect Voice.

Want to know more

Give us a call on 1800116116 or fill out below and we will call you.

Peter Hanley

 

NBN phone systems.

What phone systems can you use with the NBN to get a maximum return for your business?

There are some things that you need to know in any conversation with your provider.

First of all;

SIP  (Session initiation protocol) is simply a method to connect and run multimedia over your NBN data lines at the same time. Data, voice, video etc.  A SIP device may be a modem or a card inside your digital system.
Sip connects, monitors and disconnects your Voice calls over the internet.

ATA (analogue telephone adaptor) This allows your old analogue lines to convert to SIP access.

VOIP ( Voice over internet protocol) Much the same as SIP really and was the original medium for Voice over the net.

Now let’s not get hung up on acronyms other than being able to nod your head with some degree of knowledge when they talk about them using NBN phone systems.

Voice calls over the internet.

This is part of the NBN plan, all voice calls will now go over the NBN and the copper wire network will disappear. When? Tops a couple of years.

 

Telephone systems

With the telephone system you have now, you most likely ordered so many handsets and some Techie guy came and installed them and when they went wrong you called the guy back.
He put a big box on the wall and told you not to touch it.
If you require a small change you ring him and he charges a bundle to alter or add a feature.
That my friend is one of the advantages that the NBN and hosting have introduced. Control.
Nothing has changed really, work out what you want and get someone to do it for you. If you have an old clunker telephone system it can connect using adaptors and Sip but really give consideration to entering the new age of communications it has a bundle of advantages.

What phone systems can you have?

A traditional box on the wall type system that has a digital interface to the VOIP world. It uses all the features and benefits of the telephone system and when you are in trouble call the Techie guy. It might be a Panasonic, LG, NEC Cisco or other common brands that have been around for decades.

Live in the cloud world.

Someone somewhere has a great big industrial telephone system that has all the bells and whistles that you need.They then partition off a section just for you. You pick up your handset and over the internet it connects to your Private box and routes to the world.
If it breaks down you just yell at them to fix it, You will have a dashboard that allows you to make all the changes you can need so wave goodbye to the Techie guy.

You don’t have to pay out capital to use it as it is mostly for a monthly fee, a fee by the way that will probably include all your phone calls, so a nice fixed monthly cost.

The Cloud or hosted system is ideal for both the small user 1-15 handsets and the largest organisation.
You can link to your other offices or outlets anywhere looking like the one business.

The mid-size business may opt for a traditional system for several reasons, they already have one  is the first up reason
and over 5 years it may be arguably cheaper in overall cost.

So what do you do?

First up I would ditch any old phone system over say 8 years old and consider my options. The reasons I say this are several. The boards in the old system will deteriorate overtime and cause intermittent problems. They will be out of production and hard to come by and probably expensive. Like wise handsets don’t last forever and are also hard to replace.
Remember the phone system is really a computer and things have changed dramatically over the past decade.

Your system was designed for either ISDN or PSTN networks that will not exist in a coming couple of years.

I resisted hosting in the early days based on the ability of the Internet to carry voice traffic and data in slow speed access.The NBN network can be as fast as you want it, at a cost of course.

Grab a couple of quotes from those companies that have influence in your area. Telstra is a good start and work down from there.
The critical ingredient is support. I have some horror stories at https://fig-solutions.net/nbn-horror-stories separate Blog.
Have a look at some chat about your chosen carrier and make your mind based on either data or even a recommendation.
I use and recommend The Summit group chosen because of the Australian support, The guys tend to know what they are doing and are most helpful.

Peter Hanley

Select consulting PtyLtd