How to Buy a Phone System
Hi Bruce Naylor your Frugal Tech. I wanted to talk to you today about how to buy a phone system for your small business. Our businesses depend on reliable phones to keep doing our thing and yet there are expensive proposition, how do you buy the right phone system. What kind of things do you look for when you buy and how do you plan on purchasing one? There’s a lot of questionnaire so following make a short video and talked about some of this things.
The first thing is to know that there are basically two types of phone systems out there. It’s called the key system and was called a PBX. Okay what’s a key system? I almost think and this is a starter phone system. You know this is going to be a physical box in your phone room somewhere and you going to have like a base phone in the office that kind is the brain of this thing or is going to be a small box on the back of the phone system and the backroom.
A general of this come in different configurations such as the ability handle, three lines and 80 extensions or eight lines with 16 extensions or 12 lines and 24 extensions, 24 lines and 48 extensions and you cap out and what’s important is in your planning phase it allows some headroom just don’t buy what you need today to plan ahead because you may find it very, very expensive to try to upgrade the key system if it can be done at all.
Now, PBX or a Private Branch Exchange is the only more powerful than the key system more expensive in the key system but it would be more upgradeable than a key system. So now that you know that so it’s time to do our homework and figure out the kind of features that we need in our phone system. Well there’s certain things that you should expect in any phone system such as voicemail. I mean that’s an old brand but sometimes we forget about features like the color holding and making sure that you know our place could put people on hold proper and all that works and sometimes that feature is overlooked.
Call forwarding is also an important business feature. The ability of forward calls turning on one line to another. Now, conference thing is a very vital part of any business and basically creating a conference call should be simple and easy to do for your employees on the phone system.
Speed dial is also another very important feature you have on the phone especially if there’s no numbers that we would call, you know it saves time and it saves money. Redial is another important feature to the phone system but another feature I think is very popular although I think it is highly abused is the auto attendant and you know you have to be judicious with these things and you really have to make sure that there’s simple and navigate and don’t go too crazy with these things and always try to give your call or an option to a live human being but another thing if you don’t know what one of those is that’s when you call in for sales press one, for this press two etcetera.That’s another attendant.
Paging is another feature that may not be all that important to you but it’s a great way for an employer to broadcast your message to a group of the employees and I would through a speaker by using a handset. Another advance feature is the capabilities is what we talk about location features. So location features basically if you have employees they work in the home, you have a group of employees working in a remote location that would be invisible to the phone system just like dialing to somebody else in that building.
Now CTI computer to left in the integration that’s the big one. With this can do if you haven’t like in the CRM application such as act or Gold mines something like that and a customer calls in and they could get a screen pop on their computer showing them who’s on the line and so I think that is a killer feature to look forward in a phone system and then finally, if you follow me that ‘s just the setting up business rules in the phone systems and I don’t answer my extension at work, try my cell phone, send me a page, you can make this rules even more complicated if you like.
So how much do these things cost. Well a rule of thumb is somewhere between $500.00 to a thousand dollars per employee. Now the good news is after you get down to hurry that’s a lot of money. There are companies out that now offer was called hosted PDX, hosted key system and that’s saves you that large and front investment in exchange for a monthly fee. Company such as packet eight offer such a service and there’s plenty of mouth there on the internet so may want to take a look at that as well and of course talk to your accountant and kind of figure out with the best way to go but what you don’t want end up with is a phone system that you quickly outgrow and you can upgrade that you’ve got a junk and go on to something else.
You want to make sure it’s got the necessary features to just go and last you and do you well. The other part of the equation is when you’re getting close for phone system to get three to four different vendors competing on that equipment. Make sure to look at things like service contracts, maintenance agreements and training for the phone system as well.
So keep those in mind it’s going to be an expensive proposition but just like our computers and our networks the all phone system is just as important and of course today we also have these ability to use voice over IP with their phone systems as well or so. It could have complicate things so talk to your text specialist and get some input there. So that could save you a lot of money and hopefully I have some questions about buying a phone system. I’m Bruce Naylor your Frugal tech always love to hear from you. Make sure to leave a rating or a comment on this video. I’ll hear from you and make sure to visit us at www.FrugalBros.com and remember if its’ in your shop it’s not making you money, you’re saving your money get it out there. I’ll talk to you later.
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