How to assess your future phone system needs

If you’ve been wondering what’s likely to come on to the phone market in the near future, the answer is simple enough – Apps and new functions galore. The new business phone systems are designed to do a lot more than just manage phone calls. They’re designed to cope with multiple technologies and new ways of doing business.

Assessing your needs

There’s no need to panic about new technologies for your phone systems. If you’re going to panic about anything, worry about whether your systems have the load capacity to carry multiple apps, financial transactions and other real business operations. The demand for more capacity is increasing as business becomes more diversified and more operationally demanding. Your technology needs to be able to multi-task as much as you and your staff.

To assess your future needs, the best approach is to dovetail your business plan and your technology acquisitions. The basic working equation is that operational needs dictate communications needs.

For example:

• Do you need more ecommerce capabilities?
• Do you want more applications to send data?
• Are you involved in multiple projects?
• Are you planning business expansion?
• Is your business diversifying and opening up new areas of operation?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, you’ll need better phone systems, at the very least, and the requirement for increased capacity will be measurable.

If you answered “no”, you still need to look ahead:

The new mobile technology is a taste of what’s to come in communications. This technology is extremely efficient and very useful in all areas of business as both information technology and media technology. These functions may look gimmicky now, but they’re at the leading edge of new business operations technology. The new phones are becoming workstations and business systems, allowing people on the move to do as much business on the move as at an office.

You’ll need added capacity, and you’ll also need servers to manage your new business phone system. This is largely because the new phones and their applications handle multiple forms of information, including actual transactions on secure systems.

An overview of future phone systems

The new telephone systems are very different. This is a new design approach, and it’s a very effective, practical approach to a world in which new technologies are entering the market literally every second. The need in this environment is for good organization of resources and seamless management of high volumes of information.

The new systems include:

• Phone servers- Also called “private servers”, these machines are designed to manage phone calls the same way that internet servers operate. They improve efficiency and manage very high volume information loads across diverse ranges of communications media.

• Communications system software- New software called “contact centre” software is designed to deal with system configurations. This is a very flexible and highly adaptable approach to allocating resources within your communications network. Contact centres are “call centres in a box”. Your business phone system will have all the capacity it needs using this software.

In closing, one bit of basic advice- Don’t allow your phone system to get too out of date. Install a new system which will be able to help you manage the future.

Author Bio: Tom Mallet is an Australian freelance writer and journalist. He writes extensively in Australia, Canada, Europe, and the US. He’s published more than 500 articles about various topics, includingTelephone systems.