Making Sense of Modern Phone Systems

The biggest and almost certainly most expensive myth of business technology is that it has to be complex. That’s actually the exact opposite of the facts. Business system design, like all design, is improved by simplification. Business phone systems are a case in point. They’ve actually become much simpler, and definitely a lot easier to manage, since the days of their clunky predecessors.

Phone System Design Basics

The theory of any modern system is that it needs to be configured to be flexible, easy to operate, and have a minimum amount of “steps” in its operation. For the same reason you don’t need to chop down a tree to make one toothpick, phone systems work much more efficiently if you don’t add that “major production” element into their design.

There’s another big issue, and it’s all about efficiency – modern businesses need customized communications. They need to be able to operate any sort of business using the phone system. Some modern businesses, in fact, are more about communications than bricks and mortar. Many new businesses literally depend on their communications systems to do business at all.

The Big Change in Phone System Design

Add these two factors together and you get a very basic message: make phone system designs and management simple as possible. Nobody has the time to fiddle around with weird hardware or bizarre, complicated operational issues. “Plug and play” is the only game in town for businesses.

If you’ve ever seen one of the old-style call centres in operation, that’s exactly the situation modern phone systems try to avoid. They can’t be efficient, almost by definition. They’re too complex, and stuck with some technology which really belongs in a museum. Ironically, the big driver of new phone system design is minimizing the technology and maximizing the operational side.

The result has been a major revolution in telephone systems design. The new phone systems are based on technology which is essentially a hybrid of computer and internet technology. These are fully digital systems. Some of the new phone system technology even uses “cloud” systems to manage phone calls. The “cloud” is an internet system, and it’s therefore very well structured to deal with anything on a phone line, including information systems.

The new phone systems are more like computer systems in several ways:

• They use servers to manage calls
• They use “virtual PBX” technology to handle call stream management
• hey use software to physically manage the phones on a system.

If this sort of design is starting to suggest to you that the new phone systems are pretty similar to basic computer and intranet system design, you’re right. The really great news is that they’re equally simple. These phone systems are sometimes called a “call centre in a box”.

Even better for businesses, these phone systems are fully scalable and easy to customize. They can be configured in-house, and they’re great for those important projects and business expansion issues. You can literally set up a working system for a specific task from a screen, and tailor your phone system to match your needs.

Forget the myths and check out these new phone systems. You’ll be glad you did.