In business, sometimes getting ahead is a matter of getting rid of technology that is keeping you behind — like an antiquated PBX phone system.
Here are the 5 key reasons why a PBX phone system is a risky and costly liability instead of a strategic and profitable asset:
1. No Cross-Platform Integration
To serve the needs of today’s in-house and remote workers, PBX systems need to be augmented with third-party tools and apps to support instant messaging, video calling, contact center, directory, and so on. Not only does this create a disjointed and inefficient user experience as workers must shift from one piece of software to another — each with its own login password and interface — but businesses must manage multiple vendor relationships, and risk getting locked into costly and restrictive long-term maintenance agreements. It also imposes a major burden on in-house IT teams, who struggle to make all of the telecommunication pieces fit together.
2. Lack of Scalability
Scaling an on premise PBX phone system is expensive, time consuming, labor intensive, and complex. This makes it risky and difficult to expand into new locations or areas, or even add new workers to the system — including temporary or seasonal help. It’s also costly and difficult to implement a “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) policy, in which workers use their personal smartphones to make/receive business calls.
3. Inadequate Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
During an on-site power outage caused by a natural disaster or other emergency — or sometimes due to aging components that have reached their end-of-life milestones — PBX systems “go off the grid” and take businesses with them. Until power is restored — which could be minutes, hours or days later — customers cannot get through, and workers cannot make or receive calls.
4. Limited Features
PBX phone systems have a limited feature set, and it’s costly, difficult or impossible to add Unified Communications tools that today’s workers need to be effective and optimize customer experience, such as voicemail-to-email, find-me/follow-me, video conferencing, presence, integration with other systems in the ecosystem (e.g. CRM, billing, etc.).
5. Inadequate Reporting
The proprietary (“siloed”) nature of PBX phone systems makes it costly and complex to generate reports that shed light on relevant key performance indicators and metrics, such as first-call resolution, average time per call, call volume trends, and more. As a result, to make staffing, training and other decisions, businesses are forced to rely on gut feels and best guesses vs. reliable, actionable intelligence.
The Carolina Digital Phone Advantage
At Carolina Digital Phone, our state-of-the-art hosted VoIP phone system solves ALL 5 of these problems:
There is no need to cobble together multiple tools, systems and apps, or deal with numerous vendors. Our solution is comprehensive and supports everything that workers need and customers expect, from instant messaging to live call transfer and more. And speaking of workers: they don’t have to bounce around from one piece of software to another. They simply log into our system via the web or through their mobile device, and access everything they need to stay productive and efficient.
Our hosted VoIP phone system is designed for seamless scalability. Adding a new user takes a matter of seconds and can be done at anytime. Moving to another location is also remarkably easy, and there is no need to call a technician or install cable. Simply unplug the phone at the old location, and plug it in at the new location. The number stays the same.
In the event of a local power outage caused for any reason, our hosted VoIP phone system stays online — which means that you can forward calls to another location that is unaffected by the outage, or your workers can continue making/receiving calls on their smartphones by downloading and installing our free app (for both iOS and Android).
Our hosted VoIP phone system offers a full range of enterprise-grade calling features, including (but not limited to) auto attendant, voicemail-to-email, automatic call distribution, call announce, call queuing, hold music, presence, find me/follow me, live call transfer, call routing, and much more.
Generating usage reports is fast, easy and available anytime via web-based dashboard, so that you can monitor and track metrics like worker performance, active calls, returned calls vs. unreturned calls, call queue status, etc. You can then use this data to make smarter, faster business decisions.
To learn more about transforming your business phone system from a liability into an asset, contact the Carolina Digital Phone team today at 336–544–4000. We will provide you with a live guided demo of our hosted VoIP solution, which can be delivered over-the-web or in-person at your location.
