Hosted PBX

Do I need a VoIP Expert to Configure My PBX?

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From my experience simply buying the latest-and-greatest PBX system does not always guarantee the benefit to a customer. It’s like getting a health club membership but not making a lifestyle change necessary to take advantage of your membership.

What I have been observing here, at DLS, time after time, is that even after making a decision to subscribe to our hosted PBX service, the first order of business for most clients is to imitate the way the old system worked.

This sounds like a great idea from the prospective lowering the incline of a learning curve and quelling the unrest of users who are less receptive to innovation (regardless of whether it’s good or bad for business). Unfortunately, many companies get stuck in that “transitional” configuration and never bother to move past it.

Can you greatly improve your customer’s satisfaction or employee efficiency by upgrading to a new phone system or hosted VoIP service? Absolutely! But if you don’t configure your new PBX properly then it could very well deliver mediocre results similar to those of a decade-old clunker you’ve been keeping together with duct-tape.  Really, it is hard to unleash full ROI potential when your new PBX setup imitates the old one.

Another problem is that an unfortunate number of small business owners have no idea how to best configure or provision their new phone system setups even after spending a few days on administrator and user training sessions.

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PBX Phones Review: GXV 3175

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GXV3175 desktop SIP Video PBX PhoneGrandstream’s entry into VoIP market resembles that of auto-makers Hyundai and Kia. They had entered VoIP arena with ultra-cheap GXP 2000 SIP phones. Having to deal with their earlier series I can certainly tell you that they were of questionable quality in both: software, hardware and technical support aspects. GXV3175 is a rather ambitious attempt at a multimedia phone that supports video, Wi-Fi, POE (power over Ethernet), high definition voice and allows you to run applications.

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VoIP SPAM as We Know It

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VoIP technology has clear advantages over traditional circuit switched telephony. One of the most prominent advantages of Hosted VoIP is its relative affordability as call volume scales up. We call it “price-performance”. Unfortunately ethical and legal business operators are not the only ones to take advantage of this benefit. Accessibility of hosted VoIP resulted in lowering the cost of predictive dialing (technology allowing a PBX system to place many calls automatically).

This spam takes interactive and non-interactive forms. By interactive I mean any unsolicited robotic calls that let you talk to a live agent. Non-interactive spam is typically presented as message broadcasts (be they text, voice or email).

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Anatomy of the PBX phone system

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Call Routing Sample

Call Routing Sample

There are a lot of terms we use in the telephony world that most people don’t fully understand, even if they throw them about with abandon. This is not because those people are dumb or ignorant. Rather, it’s simply because the telephony world is filled with jargon and “alphabet soup” terminology that can make really simple systems seem much more complex than they actually are.

PBX vendors and hosted PBX service providers love to invent their own telephony language. But the truth is – the basic concepts of call switching are common regardless of whether your PBX phone system is hosted or resides on your premises and whether it uses analog, digital or latest VoIP technology. Clarifying these terms and removing the ambiguity surrounding their use is often all it takes to help owners and users understand the basics of phone systems operation.

With that in mind, let’s take a minute to clearly define some of the most commonly used terms in the world of telephony technology.

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A Word About YOUR Call Recording Storage

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A Word About YOUR Call Recording Storage

Call recording storage is not something most providers often speak of. It is considered an inner working of their infrastructure and usually is not visible to the public eye. Yet it is important for YOU to know that your hosted system is provisioned to record and keep all the calls you want it to. One of the great benefits of switching your business telephony over to Hosted VoIP lies in just how easy hosted systems make call recording appear. In a hosted environment you don’t need to worry about hooking up dedicated call recording devices or converting physical audio files to bits and bytes after the fact. Hosted PBX systems let you automatically record and save a copy of every single call running through your organization’s communication channels without giving the process a second thought.

Well, that’s not really true. All those recorded calls must be mixed, encoded and then need to go somewhere. If your hosted VoIP service provider’s storage systems aren’t robust enough or you will never get to take advantage of the full benefits offered by persistent call recording. After all, the great benefit of persistent call recording lies within the ability to pull up calls made years ago with little more than the click of your mouse. And you can’t do that if you only have enough storage to hold on to calls made within the last six months.

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The Bizarre Persistence of Toll Free Numbers

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In a perfect world, technology would advance smoothly and predictably. Every year we’d see advancements within the technologies we know and love and  everyone would adopt these new technologies as they became available, and we’d all benefit from operating at the highest possible level our modern technology affords.

Too bad, we don’t live in this perfect world. Communication technology advances at a crawl and then surge forward, organizations fail to keep up even when the benefits are clear, and all of us have to negotiate an uneven technological terrain.

Most of these imperfections are due to economic reasons, but some of them lie within peculiarities of human behavior, lack of information and irrational attachments. To understand what I mean, look no further than one of the most stubborn holdouts of days of telephony technology gone by- the toll free number.

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Freedom to Choose Your Voice Service Provider?

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Franchising business offers a good opportunity to various levels of business expertise and investment capital. Studies show that 97% of franchise businesses are still operating after the first year, compared to only 62% of independently owned. In most agency relationships, the franchisors are the risk takers whereas the franchisees prefer to steer clear of risks. In a franchising relationship, the franchisor and franchisee usually have different objectives

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Ways to Establish Hosted PBX Providers Credibility

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Have you ever heard of the old “bring the puppy home” sales trick? If not, here’s how it goes.

Say you’re cruising around with your family and you stop in a pet shop. You think you might want to get a dog for you and your kids at some point, but you’re not quite sure just yet. You look around and spot a cute little puppy that you all adore. You love the pup, your kids love the pup, all is right with the world.

Except, of course, you’re not totally sure you even want a dog in the first place. The pet store manager knows this. The manager also knows a sales trick or two, so they make you a seemingly fair offer. Bring the puppy home with you, and if you don’t want to keep the little romper, you can bring him back tomorrow.

So you take the cute little puppy home with you and lo-and-behold when tomorrow rolls around you can’t bring yourself to return the little guy… even if you remain just as unsure about your future life as a pet owner as you felt the moment you walked into the store.

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Questions to Ask Hosted PBX Service Provider References

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Signing up for a new VoIP Hosted PBX service is a big deal, and a decision you don’t want to make lightly. While it’s tempting to simply go with the cheapest VoIP service you can find, the best way to learn whether a hosted PBX provider is really worth hiring is to ask for references. Once you compile a list of references, you need to grill the hell out of the poor souls you call up looking for information.

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