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This is an excellent article discussing the
plight of small businesses and their telephone systems. Thanks to
the advent of VoIP, small businesses cannot appear to be much larger
when it comes to their telephone systems. Small businesses can
now have voicemail, call forwarding, on-hold music, hunt groups, and
many of the other features that were in the past reserved for the
much larger companies, but VoIP has changed all of that. You
can compare the top VoIP providers side-by-side at VoIPChoices.com
Virtual Call Centers are growing in number
everyday for the small and medium sized businesses. With
telecommuting becoming more mainstream, companies are finding that a
Virtual Call Center is a great way for the company to save money
while giving their employees the ability to work from a remote
location making the employee happier while saving money for the
companies bottom line. For a quick 20-minute internet/phone
presentation on how your company may benefit from a Virtual Call
Center, please contact:
Chris Landry at Sales@VoIPChoices.com
Finding Phone Answers For
The Very Small Business
By
Chris Brennan
Start-ups, small growing firms and even
home-based businesses are underserved by the telecommunications
industry. But there are telephone systems that fit if you know where
to look.
Telephone systems have grown in sophistication
by leaps and bounds in recent years, but for the most part, very
small businesses have been on the outside looking in. And with the
recent evolution in Voice over IP telephony (VoIP), the gap between
what small business needs and what the market is offering is only
getting wider.
While galloping technological advancements
have ushered in amazing new features and inversely lower prices for
most office equipment, full-featured phone systems have remained
largely out of reach for small companies. You can afford a
photo-realistic slimline desktop color printer now for a fraction of
what it cost just a few years ago, and you can beam your appointment
book back and forth from your wristwatch to your laptop for under a
hundred bucks, but the prices of telephone systems have not
decreased at the same rate. Most small companies are forced to
cobble together telephone solutions with a combination of multi-line
telephones, answering machines and costly monthly telephone company
services.
True phone systems are far more powerful,
offering flexible automated call answering features, call messaging
and call routing that can improve a company’s professional image,
control communication costs and increase connectivity and
responsiveness.
It is widely acknowledged that small business
is the engine of job creation and economic health today. With a
sophisticated, mobile workforce and limited resources for dedicated
phone answering staff, small business needs advanced phone systems
as much as its larger counterparts do. Yet according to a recent
Yankee Group study, 58 per cent of small firms in the United States
don’t have a phone system at all. More than 5 million businesses
have fewer than 20 employees, so there’s a big market for phone
systems, but the leaders in the phone industry have never been able
to produce products to fit the bill.
Why? The answer lies in the size; small
business is too small for the big traditional telephone systems, and
the scaled-down solutions that the industry has produced so far
still have price tags that are too big for small business budgets.
Big phone systems just don’t work for very small companies, and the
fewer the phone users, the more difficult the fit.
Private Branch Exchanges
Large corporations use Private Branch
Exchanges, or PBXs, which allow many phone users to share a system
with fewer telephone company lines, based on the idea that not
everybody uses their local phone extension at the same
time.
PBXs inherently offer the best telephone
system functionality available. As anyone who has ever worked in a
corporation knows, PBXs handle calls impressively with features such
as ring groups, call cascades, auto attendants, voicemail and more.
But PBXs have traditionally been massive systems for thousands of
users. When PBX manufacturers started to turn their attention to
small companies, they found it difficult to scale the concept down.
The big companies that make PBXs are not focused on very small
business, so they don’t fully understand the space.
The result has been a little like a major auto
manufacturer stripping a car of two of its wheels and most of its
body and then trying to enter the bicycle market; the results are
ungainly and overly expensive. Small business phone systems from the
major PBX manufacturers tend to be intimidating and difficult to
use, difficult to install and usually require technical staff or
consultants and expensive, proprietary phones.
Limited Small Business Solutions
So where are small companies without phone
systems getting their voicemail? How are they handling incoming
calls? How do they integrate teleworkers and mobile workers? They
may use Centrex services; telephone company voicemail and separate
lines for each phone user, which add a big boost to the monthly
phone bills. While telephone companies all over the country are all
too happy to offer increasingly complex business services, the
additional billing can add up over time to prohibitive
levels.
And there’s no real integration with offsite
workers other than simple call forwarding. The proliferation of cell
phones in the majority of small businesses has, paradoxically, made
staying in touch with customers and collaborators even more
difficult. Businesses have to give customers and co-workers
different phone numbers for the office and mobile phones, each with
separate voicemail systems, both of which are costing the company
extra money every month.
Finding Phone Systems that Fit Small
Business
Not all of the news is bad, though. A select
few companies have realized that the very small business is
underserved, and they’ve been producing small business systems that
make sense. There are excellent systems to be had in the market, if
you know what to look for. The smart new generation of small
business phone systems have all of the features of their larger
counterparts without the big business prices.
When shopping for a system, look for the
ability to easily install and configure it on your own. Installation
can cost a significant percentage of the total cost of traditional
phone systems. User-configurable systems allow you to control the
way your phone system works without having to pay the manufacturer
or a third-party technician to do it for you. The best of the new
small business phone systems enable you to do it yourself and
save.
Another important feature to look for is cell
phone and remote phone integration. If you have teleworkers and
mobile workers, you need to be able to collaborate smoothly without
giving out dozens of different numbers to your clients. There are
small business systems on the market that can connect all of your
phones through one central system with one number.
Expandability is crucial too. Make sure that
the system you buy today can grow to accommodate the changes in your
company tomorrow. And the changes in the industry — with the
emergence of Voice over IP technology and new advanced Internet
telephony services, your phone system needs to be ready to connect
to the IP network while maintaining your connections to the
traditional telephone network. Look for hybrid systems that are
built with SIP standards to ensure compatibility and avoid
obsolescence.
One promising entry in the field is the
TalkSwitch system by Centrepoint Technologies. TalkSwitch is a
hybrid phone system that offers IP and traditional telephony, and
it’s designed specifically for businesses with as few as one and as
many as 32 phone users per location. Available online and through
resellers, system integrators and interconnects, the compact,
user-friendly TalkSwitch is a prime example of the next wave of
systems that provide the power of PBX at prices that small business
can afford.
Copyright 2004 Chris Brennan
About The Author
Chris Brennan is a communication
specialist focusing on small business issues.
http://www.ctrpoint.com
information@talkswitch.com
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