Features

DLS Hosted PBX Fax Service: Signing and Notarizing Faxes Without Printing

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DLS Hosted PBX Fax-to-Email service directs all the faxes to your email. Faxes are attached to email messages as image files in Adobe PDF format.

You may be accessing your email from a variety of devices be they personal computers, smartphones or tablets. Each of these devices can be used to add signatures to PDF documents with SignNow. All you need to do is create a free account, upload your document and follow a set of straightforward, easy-to-understand directions. SignNow offers free applications for iPhone OS and Android Smartphone platforms. Your phone’s touch screen can be used to quickly capture your signature. Alternatively, you can use desktop website www.SignNow.com to produce a signature without capturing it.

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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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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Disruptive Nature of Automated Transcription and Call Indexing

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In the past I wrote about the enormous complexities facing developers of speech recognition algorithms. These complexities are what keep seemingly promising new technology from reaching us. However, if history taught us anything, it’s that we, humans, are a creative and a relentless bunch and that sooner or later these technical challenges will be succumb to our ingenuity.

Disruptive Nature of Automated Transcription and Call IndexingOver the last decade we’ve seen a number of incredible advances in the field of VoIP services and phone systems. From integrated video conferencing technologies to precisely calibrated self-learning algorithms for automated outbound calling and inbound reception, many businesses telephony services bear little more than a passing resemblance to their predecessors from the 20th century- and that’s a good thing!

Yet, as impressive as these improvements have been over the last 5-10 years, they are nothing compared to the advances we expect to see in coming years.

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VoIP Beta Testing Blues

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Points of View

I’d bet you love Beta testing new calling features for your favorite hosted pbx service provider.

No?

I want YOU for some VoIP BETA testing

What am I thinking! Of course – who in their right mind would Beta test a phone service? After all, telephones are the veins of your business, a vital part of its organism. And how would you report a problem if your phone service goes down?

So when your VoIP service provider asked if you would be interested in becoming an important part of their field beta testing program for a brand new set of features in a new release of a product that can still be littered with bugs you firmly said “No, thanks”.

You are not eager to jump on an opportunity to provide that important input, make user interface more friendly, participate in development and even sneak in a feature request that your business will benefit from the most!?. Your business is too good to be running some untested Beta software?

Well, maybe another customer is willing… No? Anyone? Someone?

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The Surprise Selling Point for Hosted PBX Solutions

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If you asked us a couple years ago why our customers ultimately decide to purchase hosted PBX solutions we would have offered you the common-sense answers you expected to hear. We would have explained that our hosted PBX systems offered increased flexibility and control over traditional systems. We would have explained how our hosted PBX solutions could scale up and down, meeting our clients ever-changing needs with just a moment’s notice. We would have explained how our telephony solutions provided the ability to tie multiple locations to a single Hosted PBX solution, regardless of how remotely they were located.

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Hosted PBX Unwrapped: VoIP Features Your Business Cannot Do Without

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ConferenceIf after careful research and deliberation your business has made the decision to upgrade to a hosted VoIP service, you are probably anxious to choose a Hosted PBX service provider and start reaping the many benefits of a hosted phone system. The first question on your mind is probably “What features does the business need?” VoIP Features such as voicemail, call waiting, and E911 are standard across providers of hosted VoIP. The advanced feature sets, however, can vary quite a bit in both: availability and implementation. When you select a service provider, you ultimately choose a set of features. In your search for a VoIP service provider, consider the following advanced features that go beyond the basics and provide your business increased flexibility and efficiency.

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How Can You Best Implement PBX Automation?

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PBX Phone System AutoAttendant Offers Many Options
=”DLS Hosted PBX Routing Tree Configurator

Introducing automation to your organization’s phone system will either be one of the wisest decisions you’ve ever made, or a potential debacle, depending on how well you implement the following best practices.

Hosted PBX Automation Step-by-Step

Get Everyone Involved

Even though it’s tempting to program auto attendant, routing tree and the flow of your callcenter without soliciting input from the rest of your organization, doing so can potentially alienate your employees and prevent you from reaping the benefits of their unique perspectives and insights. No one understands your customer’s desires and the inner workings of your current phone system better than your ground-level employees, and without their input you will never create the best possible organizational system for your organization’s new telephony experience.

Gather information and opinions from your organization’s decision makers, from your sales & marketing staff, and from those employees who actually man your phone lines day-in and day-out. It’s also wise to consult your telephony solutions supplier too, as those professionals understand the nuts-and-bolts of what has worked, and what hasn’t, for many of their past clients.

How you automate your phone systems needs to reflect the big picture of your organization, it’s branding and its core message, but it’s also a practical technological system your employees will utilize every day- so make sure they have a say regarding how it works.

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Hosted PBX Unwrapped Series: Challenges of Automatic Voice Recognition

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As computer use becomes ubiquitous, it is increasingly desirable to communicate with them in the same way that we communicate with one another: using human speech. Voice or Speech Recognition technology aims to do just this. Personally, I fell in love with the concept of voice recognition ever since I first saw “Star Trek, The New Generation” series. Unfortunately, my first attempt at making a productive use of speech recognition in Microsoft Windows 3.1 was rather disappointing.

Today our ability to use voice recognition is limited to issuing system commands to speed up familiar functions. So what prevents us from talking to our personal computers and phone systems (those are quickly converging into one) ? What you may not realize is that speech recognition is a rather complicated and resource intensive task. 

Humans easily and efficiently relay information via speech despite many complications, including background noise, slips related to spontaneous speech (stammers, filled pauses, false starts, etc.) and the inherent variability of human speech.

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Voice Recognition for Hosted PBX

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Voice Recognition Communicator

Every year our development team establishes new goals aimed to improve our VoIP Service. For the DLS Hosted PBX this means a resolution to add a significant new feature. In 2012 we are looking to bring you a set of features which will allow you to control your phone system functions using your voice. We want you to be able to control calls, change your away or presence status, send and receive messages, page one (or more) people, set up instant 3-way conferences, and even inquire about the weather, the time, or the date.

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