Does Your Company Phone System Hold You By The Calls? Submitted by Louis Sokol & Michael Mosier, Select Phone Solutions 281-501-6464 / lsokol@tservgroup.com / mmosier@tservgroup.com / www.SelectPhoneSolutions.com If you are a Baby Boomer and grew up in the ‘60s, phone systems were basically dinosaurs compared to what is available today. Home phones were barely off of the party line and a new philosophy of “unlimited” calling within a certain geographic area was brand new. Businesses could order Centrex hosted PBX functions but there was no real choice of features or pricing. Ma Bell ruled over all in a monopoly that was impenetrable until an upstart MCI took a piece of long distance calling away from them. That was the beginning of the communications revolution that we all enjoy at present. Today about fifty years later, the choices for connectivity and phone system hardware are enormous. A smart business owner will survey what is available and decide which system is the best fit by features, benefits, cost, scalability for growth, reliability of service/support and ROI (Return On Investment). As with other technical decisions such as finances, legal matters and IT support, the smart business owner will enlist the aid of a competent phone system expert to help discover the appropriate choices for their particular company. It doesn’t matter what fits any other company, the correct decision is the one for your company alone. Selecting the wrong phone system is a bad decision that will compromise productivity for several years until either new management sees the folly of the mistake and corrects it or enough time is spent with the bad system to justify replacing it without the feeling of wasting ‘visible’ money. Of course in the meantime many times more ‘invisible’ money was wasted in how employees used but hated the phone system and by limiting their productivity. While the competition may have chosen better phone systems with more appropriate features to let them move ahead to steal your clientele, was your company being held by the calls because of an unwillingness to let go of a bad situation? It may have appeared that your company was saving money by sticking with the old phone system. In reality, your company was losing far more by staying that course and not improving such a vital and crucial part of communicating with your customers with a proper phone system. Sometimes the right choice is to stay pat, in this case the best choice is to move ahead, let go of the previous bad decision and have a better future. No doubt that these are tough times for business owners and managers. How much risk do you take on by spending money and resources on a more advanced phone system? How much risk do you keep by staying with what you have? Will the benefits of the new VoIP phone system mean that you acquire new customers and keep more of your existing customers? If you quantify the value and effects of a new phone system by what the new and retained customers are worth to you, how does that number compare to the cost of that new technology amortized over a five or ten year system lifespan? Many owners and managers will decide that staying with old technology phone systems is the prudent course for now. The visionary owners and managers will look at how the change to VoIP phone systems now will be the right course in hindsight five or ten years down the road. The method of how to have better communication within your company and with customers, vendors and everyone else is changing every day. A software-based VoIP phone system will be adaptable to those changes and will not be obsoleted like the traditional phone systems your father used. Open source software such as trixbox will extend your system lifetime by years. Ask for your free phone system audit from Select Phone Solutions by calling 281-501-6464. About Our Show Advisors: Select Phone Solutions is a specialist in VOIP and especially for small businesses. We have 16 years experience in IT and because of that we know computers, networks and the infrastructure that makes the system work. Many phone system vendors today only know what the manufacturers tell them on sales sheets. They have to defer to tech support lines when anything goes wrong with your phone system. Can you wait for them to learn how to fix your phones? Because of the nuts and bolts experience of Select Phone Solutions technicians, they can both design the system that you need and also provide firsthand tech support for you without the need to first learn the system. Whether your system is 2 phones or 50 phones, you can have 24x7 monitoring of your system and an SLA to let you sleep at night. “Productivity Through Technology”