As is usually the case with technology, the big leaps forward take place at the higher levels (in the corporate sphere) and then trickle down to ordinary users at home. When it comes to telephone systems, there is no exception: Business Telephone Systems provide cutting-edge solutions to the many and diverse communication needs that a company may have, incorporating the latest technologies and utilizing the most efficient resources possible.Ask any business leader, and they will tell you that having a modern telecommunications system installed in their offices is absolutely crucial when it comes to finding new clients/customers as well as maintaining old ones, in addition to realizing a whole host of administrative chores that are essential for keeping a company afloat. In fact, the mere reference to telephones alone is insufficient at this point in the game, as all kinds of telecommunications pathways need to be integrated in order to maximize efficiency at the business place—but we'll get to that later.
With regards to simply having efficient and cost-effective telephony services at a business's offices, one crucial factor is having a Least Cost Routing service in place. Least Cost Routing (LCR) is a Business Telephone System solution that enables a buyer (aka the business) to realize outbound calls at the least possible expense, with variable controls regarding the quality of the routes being used and the quality of the calls being made. Any business that realizes large volumes of outbound calls would be wise to contract an LCR team, or install an LCR box in their offices.
The way it works is like this: Various telecoms carriers are available to carry a call from a source location to a destination; what the LCR service accomplishes is that it finds the route with the lowest fares that can carry the call needing to be made. The premise here is the fact that telecoms carriers trade destinations with each other, and there is usually more than one option for any call being made. An LCR team will create a table with all the pertinent information of carriers, routes, rates, and call quality and route quality statistics and will calculate, using advanced algorithms, which finally configuration is in the best interests of the business at hand. Of course, a business can establish certain minimal call and route quality standards and impose them on the LCR service planning process. These are measured using certain criteria, such as the average duration of a call, the amount of calls answered out of the total amount of calls made, and the delay between the last digit in a phone number dialed and the time the caller actually begins to hear a ring. The first of these criteria relates to call quality, generally, and the second and third criteria refers to the route quality. Managing a tight ship in all these regards is a central component in any state of the art Business Telephone System.
Another factor to be considered by any business trying to make their telephony service that much more efficient and streamlined is Computer Telephony Integration, or CTI. Basically, what this is about is the ability a business has to coordinate computer and telephone usage. Since modern telephone equipment is really nothing more than a specialized computer, it is logical that telephone systems should be subordinated to a business's computer network. Though there are different degrees of integration possible (first-party call control and third-party call control), the basic idea is the following: an operator can make their phone operations more streamlined and can access and save more information, more quickly. For example, a phone operator can make their dialing more expedient by utilizing automatic dialing or predictive dialing features of CTI, the latter of which is simply a more sophisticated version of the former, offering an operator a valuable tool in continuing their operations without glitches and as quickly as possible. Another aspect of CTI is the ability of operators to retrieve data from a centralized database system, accessing valuable information about the person calling them or the person they are calling (as the case may be), and allowing inbound calls to go through a series of informational filters which provide the operator with plenty of info from the get-go of a conversation. All of this information is stored in the central database, of course. Furthermore, CTI provides a business with the ability to implement call recording, a feature which can not only protect a business's interests in the case of possible litigation or claims, but generally allows for operators to accept legal commitments on the behalf of a caller and for a company to more securely monitor service quality.
In the end, Business Telephone Systems are all about sharpening a company's competitive edge. These modern systems are, in the best of cases, strategically designed to contemplate future advances in telephone and other telecommunications technologies, to cut communications costs, and to provide a higher quality service. No business profits or grows when calls are being dropped, when conversations are of poor quality and the people at either end of the line can barely understand or hear each other, and when calls aren't even getting through. Furthermore, businesses do not profit when phone operators have to tediously and laboriously search for necessary information in order to fulfill the purpose of the call they are making or that they are receiving, or when, after making or receiving a call, they have to follow an outdated and inefficient protocol in order to register whatever information was garnered from a given call. Business Telephone Systems provide companies with the ability to surmount these problems, and to create more streamlined in-house systems which reduce costs, cut times drastically (both as a measure of how long a call must take and how long it takes for the results of a call to be introduced into the company system or database), and help bring a business venture up to date with what is on the market. After all, within a relatively short period of time telephone networks will be completely subsumed by computer networks, and those that fail to rise to the opportunity will find their bottom line is seriously (and negatively) affected.
This article is written by Guest Blogger at VOIP Guides, Roger Collings. He is a telecommunications consultant who helps businesses to get the most out fo their telephone systems.
