The average business phone system lasts anywhere between six and eight years, after which the system is either out of maintenance or is lagging in features, often to the extent that it is hurting the performance of the business.

Businesses that need to upgrade their existing phone system will find a huge array of new solutions available compared to seven or eight years ago. For starters, new software-based communications solutions don’t need dedicated hardware in the storeroom or data closet anymore, because the entire system runs in the cloud.

In many instances, “hard phones” such as your desk phone are not even required. New phone solutions often include a “soft phone” or “client” that runs on many different devices, such as your PC, tablet or smartphone.

And modern phone solutions no longer offer just “voice”. They have transformed to offer a range of Unified Communications (UC) capabilities such as instant messaging, presence, video calling, collaboration tools and mobility solutions — all designed to keep your business at maximum productivity. This article will provide a quick and easy guide to common questions that arise when you’re looking for a new business phone system.

Ask yourself: What do I need from my next system?

Before you start looking at different phone system options, think carefully about what you need in your next phone system:

Here are a few questions to think about: Missed calls

• How many phone calls does your business miss because the call either goes to someone who is out of office or all the lines are busy? Disparate systems

• Do you have different systems in different offices resulting in features that don’t work the same, causing staff confusion? Infrastructure maintenance

• Is your phone system a vital organ in your business, and if it goes down, so do you?

• Have you suffered a network or equipment failure that has stopped inbound and outbound calls? Fluctuating/fraudulent expenses

• Are you worried about unexpected bills with domestic tiered minutes pricing or high International calling costs? Enterprise usage
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• Do your remote workers struggle with calling people in the business simply because they are remote?

• Does staff struggle with those endless set of buttons on the handset and end up dropping customer calls?

If you’ve identified with some or all of these questions, you are not alone. They are some of the most common issues we see today in the business world when it comes to replacing a phone system.

Which cloud phone system should I choose?

There are many different types of cloud phone systems to choose from, but it pays to really understand the underlying technology — or platform — behind your service provider.

The platform determines the provider’s ability to innovate rapidly and drive the biggest impact for your business. Some phone system providers base their service on freeware code that has been available for many years on the Internet.

It’s great for them because it is low-cost to develop and allows them to start their businesses up quickly. Unfortunately many of these freeware-based services have issues with quality, and more worryingly security that ultimately could cost you dearly with a fraud attack. Buying the correct phone system has the potential to make a huge difference to the success of your business in the next 5-10 years.

Choosing NextPointe could mean hiring less staff, winning more contracts, worrying less about disasters and yes, saving you money.

For more information on Cloud Communications solutions, contact us.

1-833-NXP-VOIP (697-8647)

sales@nextpointe.com

About NextPointe: NextPointe is a Boutique Business VoIP Service Provider based out of South Florida. We offer our Services in Miami, Broward, West Palm Beach, the Caribbean as well as the rest of the country. Why do we provide a better solution than other hosted VoIP competitors? First, our platform is based on the Cisco Unified Call Manager, this is the platform of choice of most Fortune 500 companies; our customers are getting a mature, reliable and feature rich platform. Most providers use a generic-open-source-based soft-switch that is focused mostly on a multi-tenant portal and a support of wider variety of IP Phones. Second, we only offer Cisco IP Phones with our service, that are designed and tested to work with the Cisco Unified Call manager meaning we will have very little compatibility issues and a ton of telephony features compare to our competitors that want to support any phone brand in the market; plus Cisco IP Phones are vastly superior in quality compared to any competitor at about the same price. And last but not least we offered tailored support to our customers, think like having a “telecom department” for your organization. This is the most important feature of our service; we don’t sent you to a generic portal for you to figure out the changes, or send you to an outsourced call center in India. You simply call, email or IM our team and we will make the changes for you and take the managing of the Phone Service out of your back so you can focus on your business.