With the rise of hybrid work, the widely distributed nature of today’s workforce means you’ll probably be in the market for a voice-over-IP (VoIP) system sooner or later. A cloud PBX not only lets your IT staff manage everyone’s phone from a central location, it’s also an easy way to keep a distributed team looking unified while offering a direct path to unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS). It will also provide better performance for a growing number of users, heightened security, and more thorough call accounting and reporting capabilities, so you’ll have a much better idea of what you’re spending and where.
Whether you haven’t made the transition to VoIP yet or you’re looking to change providers, your first consideration needs to be whether you want a phone system in the cloud or your building. There are several reasons to choose one over the other. Still, in general, cloud-based phone systems have a lower upfront cost and are much more agile if your company’s communications needs suddenly change or your users want to adopt a new, cutting-edge set of features. That said, in-house phone systems have a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and potentially better security.
But that’s only the beginning. While you could just sign up with a VoIP provider and make do with whatever features it offers, a better idea is to think carefully about what you want the phone system to do, how you want it to interact with your existing business, and what features you think are necessary. To do that, you’ll need to sit down with not only your senior leadership team but also the business’ frontline managers to determine how your current phone system is being used. That’s the only safe way to discover what features your workers absolutely need to keep and where there’s room for improvement and new technology.
Ask Yourself These Questions
With the above in mind, the following are 10 things you’ll need to think about when choosing any new phone system:
1. Do you have an existing phone system? If you do, whatever you choose next should be compatible, if only to make the switch over from a traditional PBX to VoIP reasonably seamless. A working phone system is a mission-critical part of most businesses, and it’s unlikely that your organization is going to welcome a week of downtime while you sort things out and return calls from your personal mobile phone.
2. What are your plans for growth? How many people will use the phone system now and how big do you think you’ll grow in the next five years? Your estimate here will affect a number of other considerations, from your network architecture to your ultimate choice of VoIP vendor. Fortunately, most IP PBX systems are pretty scalable.
3. Do you need to support analog phones? You probably want to avoid putting Ethernet ports for VoIP phones in public areas as a security measure, but you may still want to provide a way for visitors to make phone calls. Likewise, you may not want to put a costly and fragile VoIP phone in some environments, such as an outdoor assembly area or on a manufacturing floor.
4. Do you need to send faxes? Surprisingly, faxes remain an essential part of some workflows, and not every VoIP system supports fax. Some will require an adapter, some will require a fax gateway or a fax server, and some simply ignore faxing. In those cases, check out these online fax services for help.
5. How sensitive are you to downtime? Cloud services can and do go dark. If your business needs absolute call reliability, then your VoIP system, whether it’s on-premises or in the cloud, will need a connection to the analog, public switched telephone network (PSTN). But keeping such a connection ready as an option requires certain capabilities on the part of your PBX, especially if it’s in the cloud. So make sure this kind of redundant connection is supported, and know exactly how it’s supported to avoid potentially nasty surprises.
6. Which advanced features do you want for your business? All systems these days can make and receive voice calls and put people on hold with many choices for objectionable hold music. In addition, most VoIP systems offer softphones, which are applications that run on a desktop computer or mobile phone and mimic the functions of phone hardware. Other features may include video conferencing, collaboration calls, hot desking, or hoteling. You may also want instant messaging (IM), custom reporting, data export, or tougher security capabilities such as auditing, encryption, and recording.
7. Will you need a receptionist or phone operator? If yes, then you’ll need the ability to support some sort of operators’ console, and you’ll need to configure specific permissions and workflows for that person. Again, some vendors offer this, while others don’t.
8. How much usage do you anticipate? Does your sales or support staff have a large call volume? Are you running a call center? Both cases will require not only network optimizations but likely software support. Sales and support staff will need to integrate with your customer relationship management (CRM) and help desk apps, while a call center typically requires specific software other than a general UCaaS client from your voice provider. Also, look for providers that offer prebuilt integrations for the software you already use.
9. Is your network up to snuff? Voice calls either need a separate network or a virtual LAN (VLAN) with Quality of Service (QoS) support so that the voice calls remain intelligible. In addition, you need a gateway for VoIP calls that will be unencumbered by traffic spikes caused by such things as Windows Update or YouTube streaming. Small organizations can usually get by with a shared network and a properly configured VLAN, but more than that requires a separate network. And that network must be fast enough, which means if you’re not running Gigabit Ethernet (GbE), then you’re not fast enough.
10. How mobile is your workforce? Is a significant percentage of your workforce mobile? Many of today’s VoIP systems offer smartphone apps that duplicate the functionality of their desktop clients, but not all do. Also, when employees are using their own devices and unknown, possibly insecure networks, you’ll need to think about implementing additional layers of security. These might include things such as call encryption or placing calls only via a virtual private network (VPN) service, which can make it harder to maintain call quality.
Cloud or On-Premises?
You’ll notice that I haven’t discussed these factors in terms of a PBX located on-premises or in the cloud because most of the same considerations come into play either way. But it’s worth noting that some factors, such as a need for analog phones or heavy fax use, may eliminate some options. In our testing of VoIP and UCaaS systems, we’ve noted that today’s cloud phone providers offer many benefits for practically any business, including lower overall costs, a deeper feature set, and integrated communications channels that include not only VoIP phone calls but also video conferencing, texting, and online collaboration tools.
Still, while most businesses can default to such VoIP-based solutions, there are still on-premises PBXes being sold to some organizations, due mainly to custom or legacy software and certain security requirements. That’s research about your business you’ll need to conduct before making any kind of selection.
