Business VoIP Featured Article

You're Ready to Ditch Your Business Phone System. Now What?

February 14, 2018

By Gerald Baldino, Senior Content Producer

Let’s face it: If you’re reading this, your phone system is most likely broken. In fact, as Rad-Info President Peter Radizeski pointed out during today’s ITEXPO panel “My Phone System Sucks. Now What?” broken phones are the number one trigger for purchasing a new phone system.


For most businesses, voice communication isn’t even noticed until something goes wrong. Call quality may begin to suffer, for instance, and you may start to experience jitter and garbled communications. Or, your hardware may be discontinued forcing you to scrounge for parts on eBay — a time consuming and frustrating process.

When these types of issues arise, and important calls fail to connect, you need to know what actions to take so you can restore phone access and keep communications moving.

As the panel proved, though, there are many important questions that you will have to consider during this process if you want to implement a system that is reliable, cost-effective and capable of serving your business’s unique needs. At the same time, the business communications market is highly commoditized. There are a lot of options—and a lot of confused buyers.

As Cloudonix COO Eric Klein pointed out during the panel, many people are unsure about how to even get started when purchasing new business phone system. Plus, they aren’t asking the right questions during the installation and configuration stages. What ends up happening is a system gets built more on what someone thinks the business should have, rather than what they actually need. And this leads to buyer’s remorse.

Making things even more complicated, many organizations still lack deep visibility into their networks making it impossible to perform root cause troubleshooting and accurate planning. Without network visibility, businesses are likely to purchase products that they think will fix their problems — only to wind up experiencing the same issues again. No phone system, in other words, will make up for a lack of capacity.

Here are some key questions that business owners should be asking during the phone purchasing process:

  • Would a hosted cloud, or on premises solution work best?
  • How comfortable are you outsourcing communications?
  • Should you go through a dedicated phone systems provider, or expand your relationship with your current OEM that you are already doing business with?

As the panel suggested, one of the most important things you should focus on when choosing a new phone system is your business needs. Consider your vertical market, and your core function. Do you have a distributed workforce? Are you sales-driven? Different phone systems will offer specific features that you can use to enhance productivity, ensure security and compliance and streamline collaboration. It’s important to shop around and assess your options before diving into a new contract.

Remember: As Radizeski explained, it’s vital to consider all elements of your implementation strategy. Most businesses will plan for large, important logistical considerations when installing new phone systems. But they may overlook smaller things that can lead to unexpected performance issues down the road. It’s the little things that can get in the way and slow you down. 




Edited by Ken Briodagh

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