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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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Cloud-based VoIP vs. Dedicated Hosted PBX Service

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Cloud Computing and Virtualization has received a lot of attention lately, largely due to a huge marketing push initiated by a number of big corporations hoping that peddling shared computing infrastructure solutions is the “next big thing.” If these advertising messages are to be believed, Cloud Computing and Virtualization provide increased reliability, reduced expenses and an unprecedented level of convenience for most I.T. applications.

Call me a technological heretic but I believe that virtualized cloud infrastructure guarantees neither of those things while taking away a lot of control over how your resources are allocated.

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The Continued Importance of Stationary Handsets in the Smart Phone Era

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The rise of the Smart Phone has been dramatic. It seems like everyone has one of these devices these days, and nearly every single Smart Phone owner raves about their device. Smart Phones certainly represent attractive and powerful telephony technology. Not only are they sleek and stylish, Smart Phones also provide a huge range of features and applications which you can take with you everywhere you go. While Smart Phones have presented a superior alternative to previous mobile phones, does that mean they stand to replace all telephony devices?

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What VoIP Readiness Assessment Does Not Tell You

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In the previous posts I had covered many obvious business reasons driving business VoIP adoption in the enterprise including costs savings, productivity increases, and image benefits. These benefits are typically enabled by VoIP infrastructure on a converged network, but achieved through IP telephony applications such as messaging, conferencing and geographic independence.

Realizing VoIP Hosted PBX benefits can be a challenge, and organizations may experience frustration, stress and even despair as they work to deploy it in their environments. Generally speaking, VoIP is much more than just another application on the network, and most organizations have never managed an application with high availability and performance requirements like those of VoIP.

The only real way to ensure lasting trouble free voice quality in an enterprise VoIP Hosted PBX deployment is through proper management of all of the devices within network path between the endpoint device (be it a handset, computer or a softphone) and a VoIP Hosted PBX service provider system.

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Hosted PBX Trends

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Over the past few years there have been numerous online discussions and articles on the subject of “cost” and “price/performance” of the Hosted PBX. Today these discussions are sounding more and more like outdated statements of the obvious. Yes, it is obvious that Hosted PBX is far more feature rich and cost effective than traditional PBX or outdated Centrex services, but that isn’t the point. Appropriately chosen communication technology very directly impact ways and speed with which business is being conducted, more important than ever in the current economic climate.

Recognizing the Value of Hosted PBX

For most businesses, however, communications does not fall into realm of their core competencies. Conventional school of thought preaches that you are not going to be a better law firm, architecture firm, pizza shop, etc by running a better phone system than the competition. But that simply isn’t true any longer. With Hosted PBX services reaching beyond simple voice or SIP trunking and becoming full Unified Communications solution, we see promotion of Hosted PBX as a smarter strategic play for SMBs. The value of converging — or integrating — data, voice and video communications over a single IP network comes in the improved ability of people to share, discuss and develop ideas with colleagues anywhere in the world. Voice itself can become a “killer app.” The new standard environment integrates voice mail, global telephone network, directory, presence, unified messaging capability, text-to-speech, conferencing, online phone, address book and more. Enterprises adding voice to other IP-compliant applications really begin to see what the technology can do for them.

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Android As Your Desk Phone

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Android gained huge popularity with smartphone manufacturers, so it should come as no surprise that the desk phones featuring Android operating platform would start appearing. Lots of companies have been rumored to be working on Android tablets this year in the wake of the iPad 3 launch. What we haven’t heard much of until now is an Android-based desktop handset. Some have recently begun working on Android-powered desk phones.

Why put Android on a desk ? For one: plenty of apps, including visual voicemail, calendars, SMS, and email. Android-based technology offers you the first phone that gets smarter over time instead of obsolete. The other reason is that Google has broad plans for Android. In May of 2011 as it was shipping its new 3.1 version of Android at the company’s annual developer’s conference, Google announced that the next release of its operating system will offer features that would make it more suitable for use on a a big-screen, multi-touch desktop computer. And this, my friends, could have far reaching consequences for Apple and even Microsoft.

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Hosted PBX Toll Fraud Attacks: Phreaking

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Phreaking (or phone hacking, toll fraud, dial-through fraud) is not new. In the not too distant past it was often a domain of adolescents with modems, phone lines and a PCs looking to make a couple of calls on someone else’s tab to their friends out of state or, sometimes, out of the country. Those call volumes often went unnoticed in the overall vast number of calls on company’s phone bill.

Toll Fraud

But phreaking in this day and age has moved from geek to something more sinister and more damaging. Telephone phreaking of Internet era is a big business run by an organized crime. What’s also interesting is that telecommunications carriers reap substantial benefits from these activities by demanding payments for the tidal wave of illegal call traffic phreakers generate at the victim’s expense. Some insiders hint that phreaking is telecommunication’s industry’s biggest dirty secret, generating massive funding for carriers.

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Integrating Hosted PBX and Cloud Desktop Services Into Move Strategy

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Business relocation and expansion decisions are among the most important ones company executives have to face. The rapid advances in information and communications technology over the past few years have dictated a change in the attitude towards working practices, employment patterns and, subsequently business relocation.

When moving a business, small or large, IT relocation strategy matters. Many businesses can not afford to be off their computers for more than a couple of hours. The process of relocation involves the difficult task of packing and a risky affair of moving. The IT department is often called upon to coordinate an internal department move, help relocate a remote office, or be involved in an entire company move. But IT and communications relocation are far more than just disconnecting, packaging and moving equipment. Among most common reasons of business moving disasters are: poor planning, lack of understanding of all of the essential IT components and services that are required and inability to develop a realistic and practical timeline. Many times a decision to move is dictated by availability of space, contract obligations and a desire to minimize the time of operation in multiple locations during the transition.

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FCC’s VoIP Regulation Dilemma

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telephone

1835, “apparatus for signaling by musical notes” (devised by Sudré in 1828), from Fr. téléphone (c.1830), from télé- “far” (see tele-) + phone “sound” (see fame). Also used of other apparatus early 19c., including “instrument similar to a foghorn for signaling from ship to ship” (1844). The electrical communication tool was first described in modern form by P.Reis (1861); developed by Bell, and so called by him from 1876. The verb is attested from 1878.

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) has become a mature technology that allows individuals to place phone calls using the Internet Protocol. VoIP utilizes the Internet infrastructure to make voice and video calls as opposed to the traditional public switched telephone network (PSTN) that has been in place for more than a century. VoIP service is less expensive to provide and operate as compared to traditional telephony. Another advantage of VoIP is that a subscriber can make a voice or video call from any global location with a broadband Internet connection. Modern VoIP telephony evolutionizes the boundaries of telephony by adding voice, presence management, chat and other services and by then embedding it into many business applications that are run on computers.

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