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Five Features You Need In Your New Phone System

When you are ready to purchase a new VoIP phone system for your company, there are five simple features that you need - features that will make all the difference between success and failure.

But these aren't technical features like voicemail to email. These are essential features that matter to your employees and your business far more than any new VoIP-based gimmick. When considering any phone system, whether it is VoIP and SIP based or an older key system or something else altogether, there are features and considerations that will make the difference in a successful implementation.

Choice

Choice might not seem like an important feature – after all you are making the choice right now about what phone system to buy. But choice is important to the users of the phone system – not a choice about what backbone, what architecture the system will use, but a choice of handsets and headsets that give the end user the level of comfort and control they need. The handset or headset for any phone is the interface between the user and the system and is critically important. Headsets should be wireless, light, comfortable and clear. Handsets should be comfortable when held in the hand and when pressed against an ear by a shoulder. Technical features do matter in this choice. Users want speakerphones and mute buttons and volume controls and programmable buttons. They want one touch access to voicemail – and they want you to give them a few options to choose from. In practice this very likely means that the system should be able to make use of generic SIP phones so that a wide range of options is available or else the manufacturer needs to offer a good range of its own or OEM options.

Reliability

Of course you should expect reliability in any phone system you purchase, but being completely honest, the reliability nowadays of most VoIP equipment is just fine – certainly for the three year replacement cycle you will likely have. But equipment reliability is not what we are talking about here. We are talking about vendor reliability – the reliability of the company that is providing you with your phone system.

Unfortunately, apart from the biggest name – Cisco – there is a great deal of volatility in the phone system market. It is worse at the low end for small business systems but it is still bad at the high end. For years Nortel was the second largest VoIP company behind Cisco – but now it is in bankruptcy and being sold off piecemeal. So, yes, you could go with Cisco, just like people used to say you couldn't go wrong buying IBM. But there is a price premium that comes with that. For small business and hosted systems you should investigate the stability and financial health of your vendor just as much as you investigate the products. There is good news, however. If a VoIP company goes under, one or more of its competitors is usually happy to step up and offer a deal to take over. But you are still quite likely to have changes in service details and in equipment that may be hard to adjust to.

Quality

Quality is the flip side of reliability and the two usually go hand in hand. But in this case you do care about the quality of the equipment because for phone systems quality comes as two parts. The first part is equipment quality. This is as basic as what the quality of the microphone and speakers are in your handsets. If you have bad microphones and speakers you will have bad sound – it's as simple as that. There is a reason, for example, that Polycom has a great reputation for those starfish-shaped conference room speakerphones – it is because they are very good quality and so have great sound.

The second part is the quality of the service. Some vendors are offering HD sound quality – higher quality sound over VoIP that supposedly rivals CD-quality sound. And when it all works it sounds great. But you need HD equipment on both ends AND a high quality connection, And the connection and the service provided by your VoIP supplier are the second part of the quality equation. If you only ever get bad connections and bad lines because your provider is always cutting corners on bandwidth allocation, then you will get low quality calls. If you are also getting bandwidth from the same company as your phone system then this two is part of the service they provide and should properly match your phone system.

Ease Of Use

Ease-of-use is often overlooked when getting a phone system. This is probably because the basic function you are buying – making and receiving calls – is such a standard procedure that everyone has to do it the same and there aren't really any ease-of-use issues. But part of the reason for getting a modern VoIP phone system is to get a lot of additional functionality like call queuing, call parking, voicemail-to-email, find-me-follow-me and unified communications to access phone calls, IM and more from any device.

There is no point having these features if none of your employees or staff can figure out how to use them or even if they know how to use them still can't manage it in the hectic rush of the work day. So ease of use for these new features is critical. It is important to get a demo or at least a chance to observe the new features in action on the devices you are going to purchase – and preferably get a range of the people who are going to use the equipment to evaluate it. That way you will know if the system is easy for people to use.

Scalability

The last of these critical features is scalability. Typically – you hope – this is scalability upward. But scalability downward can be important as well when economic times are bad. You don't want to be paying for phone lines you can't use. But let's be positive. Can the system grow – and can it grow enough? Old fashioned key systems were limited in the number of lines they could handle so if your business grew beyond a certain point it was time to buy a new system – another capital cost.

That's a relatively good problem to have but nowadays you don't need to have it at all. Both on-premise and hosted solutions can scale up and down although hosted systems have a natural advantage and can scale down in size (and cost) more easily than an on-premise solution.

These five features are not just as important as the technical and gadgety features of your new phone system – they are more important. So bear them in mind during your purchase decision.

You can find out more about the technical aspects of VoIP phone systems for your business in this Buyers Guide.