Voice

Is Your Phone System Agile Enough to Scale?

September 14, 2015

It’s the first day of a new quarter, you’ve just wrapped up a series of planning meetings with your team, and you notice an email from the CEO of your company. He wants to sync up with you on his vision for growth over the next 12 months, a plan that he says will involve the addition of several new management roles. Easy enough, you think. The company’s phone systems are already set up in each of its regional offices, which means adding new employees should be relatively simple. But then the CEO hits you with this caveat: The new managers won’t likely be working in those offices. Because the CEO wants to hire the very best talent for these new roles, he doesn’t want to be restricted to hiring people who only live in (or are willing to move to) cities where the company has offices. This means these new managers may very well be home-based — and the CEO needs you to ensure the business is capable of meeting that requirement.

Is Your Phone Infrastructure Responsive and Flexible?

Unfortunately, most people don’t consider the scenario above (or any number of other possibilities) until their backs are up against the wall. The problem with that, of course, is that most legacy phone systems aren’t capable of delivering the responsive, flexible service that modern businesses require. Just think about these common challenges:

• If your company suddenly went into acquisition mode and added new offices around the country, would your phone system be able to quickly respond to those changes?
• If your company experienced a seasonal spike in call volume and usage, would your phone system scale to that demand?
• If your company went on a hiring spree, could those employees intuitively activate and self-service their phones, or would you need to do all of that work for them?

If those sound like extreme circumstances, consider this true story. One IT manager recently shared with us that to set up a new employee with a phone, he had to send an email with a request to add the new employee. He then had to wait for a response confirming that the employee would be set up. He’d receive an email to confirm the information he’d already provided, then had to submit his changes to the information. Once everything was final, he’d receive the phone for the employee. The whole process took two weeks — all to add just one new employee.

3 Arguments for World-Class Cloud Phone Systems

In today’s fast-paced world, very few businesses can afford that kind of delay. The good news?  That kind of disruption is completely unnecessary thanks to the innovation of world-class cloud phone systems. These systems are responsive and intuitive, and they provide three key areas of agility that IT departments need to support evolving businesses:

1. Ability to quickly add and remove employees no matter where they’re located in the United States. The benefit of cloud systems isn’t just phone service connectivity to remote or home offices. It’s also user experience consistency and company-wide productivity. After all, the easier it is to connect to the system, the happier and more productive you – and every other employee – will be.

2. On-demand training that allows every user to maximize phone system capabilities. The very best cloud phone systems offer training so that every user (new, old, technical and non-technical staff, etc.) can extract maximum value from basic features and third-party applications, such as Salesforce.com integration.

3. Options to turn phone system management over to a trusted third-party provider. While some IT managers or executives prefer to have control over their phone systems, others no longer have time for that task as their responsibilities increase. World-class cloud phone systems give you the option to choose how much or how little you manage, and also offer 24/7 system support.

Ultimately, many people overlook the phone system as a critical business tool, but they wouldn’t be able to conduct business without it. Further, it’s not enough to simply have that tool today — it must also be flexible enough for every employee to have access to what they need, where and when they need it. Of course, providing this capability falls squarely on your lap, which begs an important question: Is your company’s existing phone system prepared to help you deliver it?

While your here check out ShoreTel Connect, the brand new revolutionary phone system release from ShoreTel. 1 Platform, 2 Delivery Choices, 3 Deployment Options (Onsite, Cloud, Hybrid)

Tags: Cloud Phones