4 Things to Look for in a Phone Solution for Large Enterprises

Research from Bain & Company shows that big companies like Apple, Google, and Dell are 40% more productive than the average company. And the average company loses more than 25% of its productive power to processes that waste time. This often happens as the company grows.

As business phone is the dominant communication channel for most companies, it is, thus, even more critical for large companies to have the phone system that optimize the work productivity and time management.

What to look for in a phone solution for corporations?

The best phone system in 2018 will simplify the workflow your corporations, scale easily as your companies grow, and support multiple sites and remote connectivity of your mobile workforce.

1. Simplify the workflow

New phone systems can integrate seamlessly with Google Analytics, CRM, and many other systems through Zapier. This will ultimately save you time and increase your work productivity. For instance, when a customer has an inquiry, it will create a ticket automatically into the ticketing system of the company so that customer service representatives can receive a note on the next step of action.

Other PBX phone systems have in-built Call Tracking tool that enables you to track the source of your incoming call and to scientifically evaluate the performance of your marketing campaigns.

2. Connect multiple sites

Most Cloud PBX can allow your staffs to call from any phone available to them with the main corporate number or numbers in any countries they work in and with similar voicemail, extension. Besides, your mobile workers can divert calls to their mobile phone numbers in any countries. This can provide great convenience to your teams, and hence promote productivity of your organizations. 

You will also maintain a smooth connection between mobile users and offices if everyone in the central company directory can directly reach other members by dialing internal extensions.

3. Scale easily

If your corporations are growing fast and hence need to increase the number of phone lines, look for a phone system that allows you to upgrade in small increments. Cloud PBX, for instance, allow you to simply add or remove phone extensions yourself from your online account.

This will bring enormous convenience to the IT Manager and save their time and effort when there is great fluctuation in the communication need of the corporate.

4. Deliver stable call quality

Whether a call suffers from echo, choppiness, or delay, the disruption of a given call can result in anything from minor annoyances to serious impediments. Hence, it is important that you choose a phone system from a service provider that guarantees high availability with stable quality. Many licensed telcos provide SS7 connection in so the call quality is considerably higher than others vendors.

If you are needing any or all of the above features, switch to ZONE Cloud PBX system today. ZONE has pioneered the concept of agile communication to give you the ability to easily scale your phone systems and integrate to many other systems you are using. You can easily mix and match the various apps to fit your use cases and scale the calls capacity effortlessly. Our Cloud PBX also supports numbers for 100+ cities in over 70 countries. With that we are happy to provide the best coverage in Asia-PAC.

Contact our team of experts today to learn more about our solutions for your business.

Key Features of a Cloud Phone System for Every Business

Nowadays, with fast-moving telephony infrastructure and constantly evolving technology, businesses find the need to keep up with these changes by switching to a more advanced telephone system. The latest VoIP technology has enabled business operations to run easier, smoother and much faster.

Analog lines are history as with today’s digital technology, you can opt for a VoIP phone system that offers much more flexibility and leading-edge features. You can keep the communication channels open, but still get the great complement of accessories without a significant investment. Hence, here we are to present you seven key features to look for when choosing your VoIP phone system.

Auto-Attendant

Have you been in a frustrating situation trying to reach a real person on the phone? Calling a business can be a difficult experience. An auto attendant will surely addresses this issue by acting as a virtual receptionist, directing your customers to the exact department they want.

Studies indicate that 48% of customers find that customer service reps answering calls is unhelpful. An auto attendant is a fantastic feature that improves customer service and avoids being part of this statistic in several ways, then save time for both your customers and businesses.

Virtual Line allows you to receive incoming calls, play greeting messages in multiple languages, forward calls to unlimited destinations, configure up to 5-layered call flow, and it comes with unlimited international DID Numbers. This can be set up on either an organization level or department level.

Call Routing, Distribution, and Forwarding

Call holding and transferring are super faster and easier with VoIP solutions.

Today’s phone systems come with real-time call transferring feature, which also means that your co-workers and clients are able to reach you on your mobile phone or any other available contact devices. This feature will let you customize the settings and to ring all your devices simultaneously or with your own flow configuration. If you can’t be reached on all devices, our phone system will automatically direct the caller to your voicemail then notify you via email.

Call Conferencing

Face-to-face meeting is no longer the only option when evolving technology has allowed us to be able to conduct video or voice meetings with multiple employees or clients across different locations. That’s why call conferencing capabilities should be the next included feature to provide  your business’ flexibility when it comes to operational matters. These calls can be conducted through IP phone units with up to eight parties in a room.

International DIDs availability

With VOIP, you can have as many different international or local DIDs as you want to ensure local presence in multiple countries. We provide landline, mobile, toll-free or golden DID numbers of more than 60 countries and also support number retention – port in numbers from other telcos with a much lower oversea call rates.

Call Recordings

When it comes to call management, call and voice recording is indispensable. Without monitoring calls for quality assurance, it’s nearly impossible to find out how well employees have met the needs of clients, and therefore impossible to measure success and failure. Call recording effectively addresses key problems and also in identifies areas of improvement.

Furthermore, recorded calls will largely help in obtaining extensive data of your customer base as well as be of assistance to resolve customer issues more quickly. It also lends a helping hand in handling irritating, lousy customers. Wouldn’t it be great to cut down on these hassles?

Agent Performance Analytics

Most call centers must get used to daily reports which is the main tool to collect data and see how well things were going. However, this type of reporting didn’t always provide an overall picture of what was working and what wasn’t with regard to agents, teams and strategies.

Today many call center analytics solutions offer live reporting and dashboard views of performance data, both real-time and historical. It enables the supervisors to direct manpower and resources to where they are most needed, getting calls answered rapidly by the right agent and precisely evaluate agent behaviors to enhance service quality. This information can also be used in trainings to boost call agent effectiveness and improve the customer experience. As an added bonus, more effective communication reduces handle time and operating costs.

In short, the call center managers will be armed with constantly updated information and insights, then take proactive steps to ensure the best possible experience for their customers.

Call Tracking Analytics

Through customer data analysis, companies can accurately predict customer behaviors and trends, and decide what actions should be taken. Call Tracking will quantify the effectiveness of your marketing efforts much more simple. Its ability to track the online and offline sources of prospects calling you with attribution models offers greater accuracy. Data is organized in both Visual and CDR reports for you to easily analyze and then optimize your advertising effort towards the effective channels sending the highest traffic to your website.

Analysis of external factors, such as tracking social media streams for brand mentions or specific issues with a product can predict inbound traffic and optimize your advertising effort towards the effective channels that are sending the highest converting traffic to your website.

In Conclusion

As we all aware, innovation and adaptation lead to successful management. Many businesses have decided that their traditional phone systems are obsolete when the telephone industry kept following the change with incredibly advanced customization.

How about you?

The ultimate guide to the best communication system for your business

As you are here, you must be looking for an optimized communication system to maintain rapports both internally and externally. How to save time and effort and to avoid getting drown in high-tech information? Either you are a brand new startup or would like to switch, expand, upgrade, downgrade your current communication system, you are at the right place!

Define the best phone system for your business

First thing first, what makes the best phone system?

Actually, you don’t have to be a telecommunications expert, or hire an expensive consultant to come to analyze your business’s needs to help choose the ultimate phone services. It’s pretty simple if you get off to a flying start.

There are a number of factors to consider, such as how you want to tailor the system, what kinds of connection you prefer, whether the cost is reasonable, if it has all of the features you want or offers collaboration tools that suit your business, and provides the mobility tools…

In other words, a best phone system will fit your business perfectly. It is the one that not only fits your planning budget, but also offers the features you may need when business expands, and customized options to meet your specific needs.

What are your options?

When your business is small, you can easily get by with one telephone line. However, as your business expands, you need to add more phones for staff who may be located in oversea offices, or move around frequently, things can get complicated.

In currently fast changing world, business phone systems have become much more flexible. Traditional phone systems are no longer dominant but have been digitized to catch up with other modern types. PBX systems, once referring to complex networks, have gone hosted as well. This means you have many options to consider than ever.

Let’s take a closer look at these two popular phone systems to give a thorough assessment.

Traditional Private Branch Exchange (PBX)

With more phone lines, and more phone numbers, both customization and expense will grow. Luckily, there’s a sophisticated equipment that can manage this situation—PBX, or “private branch exchange”. It helps you connect all the phones in a company, or across multiple locations, together. When considering PBX for your business, take into account the following pros and cons:

A PBX can accommodate your businesses with multiple locations as a stable and independent infrastructure.

Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP)

The other option is VOIP, a technology that allows you to make voice calls using a broadband Internet connection instead of a analog phone line. VOIP is now more application-based, transitioning from hardware systems to softwares that is leased in a cloud model. The pros and cons are:

In this cloud era, businesses needed to invest their own infrastructure to host an advanced on-premise phone system. And why not, with prices lower, features greater and choices more abundant it should be the way to go?

Which system do we recommend?

As a matter of fact, the definition of a PBX phone system has transformed since the rise of VoIP technology. Hosted and virtual PBX phone systems—also known as cloud-based PBX, have made up for physical hardware obsolete in many cases and small businesses can also leverage its benefits through the cloud.

Hence for most growing businesses, we recommend using a cloud-based PBX phone system from a provider like ZONE. The most obvious competency of VOIP must be the availability of most features you expect for your business, but without the costly initial hardware and installation costs of a traditional or IP PBX.

A cloud PBX only requires a sufficient internet connection and phone handsets which is optional as you can also use mobile phones or desktop softphones to save the cost. All of phone system’s features, such as the auto attendant, phone tree, and voicemail boxes are managed online. This also has the additional benefits of making the system highly scalable, since you can add and remove extensions at any time.

As your office grows beyond 30 or 40 employees, however, either cloud-based PBX or IP PBX would be suitable for you. Because of the big number of phone extensions, there’s not much difference between investing in the costly one time IP PBX maintenance, setup fee and monthly subscription fee. Both will be able to bring cost savings in management, maintenance, and affordable call rates, plus add-on cost benefits and efficiencies.

Finally, your choice!

In a nutshell, IP telephony is proven to be the promising future of human communication and its benefits are so clear that you don’t even need to consider the traditional PBX.

We hope this post have helped you evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of PBX versus VoIP to find out which is the best fit for your business as well as ensure that precautions are taken.

If you’re interested in getting a cloud-based PBX phone system for your business, take a look at the related article below or contact us. You will see a range of plans that let you pick the phone services you need to give your enterprise the flexibility and big business image you’re looking for. 

Choosing The Right Phone System For Your Business

Business phone is still the dominant communication channel for most companies in today’s world. A professional phone system can always increase the trustworthiness of your business and streamline your internal and external communication process.

The best  business phone system should offer you the features you need while keeping costs low. Therefore, more and more organizations are upgrading their communication systems given the advantages of VoIP. If you’re also looking for a new business phone system of the right size and features in 2018, you need to ask yourself 5 fundamental questions below.

1. What is the type of phone system you need?

2. How much are you willing to invest?

3. Do you want a cloud-based system or a premises-based one?

4. Do you need to do business over mobile phones?

5. How much fluctuation is there in your communications needs?

To answer the questions above, it is very important that you understand the options available for you.

What are the types of phone systems available today?

There are 2 main types of phone systems: Analog and VoIP.

Analog

Traditional analog phone service is typically supported by local telcos. It relies on the PSTN – complex system of hardwired landlines – to transmit calls. We’re all familiar with it. Yet that doesn’t mean it is still the best choice, especially for businesses in global market.

In fact, this old school and inflexible solution is being phased out by VoIP and other Virtual phone systems because it can no longer compete with those new services in terms of features, cost and maintenance.

VoIP System

VoIP phone system works through the Internet you are using rather than a copper wiring. Demand for VoIP services is rising owing to low upfront, maintenance and usage cost with higher flexibility, effortless customization, unrestricted scalability.

Cloud-based or premises-based system?

If you are interested in VoIP and then reach out to VoIP service providers, they will offer you either Cloud-based or premises-based system. We don’t always trust sales guys and simply accept what they offer but do you want to delve into telecom world to choose the best one for your company?

To make a right decision, consider 3 basic differences between Premises-based and Cloud-based systems below.

1. Cost

If you go for premises-based system, you should expect to pay high upfront cost for a device called IP-PBX, high subscription plan and installation costs. Beside hardware and setup costs, there will be maintenance and service costs in case you need to re-configure or add more phone lines.

However, modern companies like yours are moving away from aging software and hardware phone solutions to cloud-based communication system because it offers features of an on-premises system at much cheaper price. Besides, you can literally call anywhere in the world at a fraction of the rates you would normally pay. You still have full control over your phone system and change it when you need with an online account. So there is no need to assign a dedicated IT personnel to manage the system.

2. Flexibility

On-premise systems require a third-party softphone to communicate between a mobile device and the on-premise software. It’s definitely not a big problem as you can download many softphone apps for free. However, you will need to buy softphone business plan to have all necessary features and this can add more cost into the already expensive IP-PBX system.

In contrast, most cloud systems can be accessed easily from mobile devices, and many even offer built-in mobile apps allowing you to stay in touch with business calls regardless of where you are.

3. Scalability

You should also consider whether your team will grow fast and hence need to increase the number of phone lines. If there will be great fluctuation in your communication need, then a premises-based phone system will not as suitable to you as a cloud-based one. To reconfigure an on-premise IP-PBX you need to hire an IT specialist, while cloud PBX allows you to simply add or remove phone extensions from your online account.

About ZONE Cloud PBX

ZONE ZENTREX Cloud PBX solution enables you to easily mix and match the various apps to fit your communication needs, giving you the ability to extend and scale your phone system effortlessly.

You can setup voice greetings, create phone extensions to forward calls anywhere: office, mobile or home. Furthermore, you can buy landline, mobile, toll-free or golden DID numbers of more than 60 countries and all calls made between ZONE DID numbers are free. Best of all, there is no minimum contract.

Features

• Unlimited layers of automated phone attendant

• Call transfer, call hold and call into conference

• Call hunting – ring queue and ring group

• Missed call message and voicemail notification to email

• Built-in Bizphone apps and compatibility with all SIP-enabled devices

• Separate DID for each sub-IVR menu level

• International numbers, toll free, landline, mobile and golden numbers

• User-friendly portal to set up and update phone system

Leave your phone number at the form below to get 1 month free trial. If you haven’t made the decision yet, still feel free to fill the form. We would be happy to help you assess your goals and resources and guide you through the solutions we offer through free consultation. No contract or credit card required!

What are Types of VOIP Phones?

Forget all hassling heavy hardwares in your office, VOIP technology today allows you to enjoy the convenience of flexibility and portability. Regardless of where you are, just make sure you have Internet access, there should not be any problems in terms of costs and connections. VoIP systems are also accessible while you are moving around or traveling overseas.

So once you decide to move forward with a cloud phone system, what devices will be suitable for your office? Let’s see what types of VOIP Phones you have at hand is the general definition, they can be software-based or purpose-built hardware devices that look alike an ordinary telephone. The four popular types of VoIP Phones and devices supported are:

• Softphones installed on Computers or Laptop

• VoIP (IP) Phones

• Mobile Application

Softphones (installed on PC or laptop)

Softphone (software telephone) is an application that enables voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) from personal computer or laptop devices. Your softphone, whether it runs on your desktop or smartphone, will use a data connection to reach your voice service provider. When you choose to go with softphones (instead of a hardware device), they connect directly to the Cloud PBX system so you can make and receive calls from the virtual number or extension that is associated with that account. With WiFi or a direct internet connection, you can enjoy the service from your personal device.

A softphone looks the same as any other application. Once you double-click or tap the icon to load the program, you can use the mouse or touchscreen to dial a number. You can speak through the softphone like you would normally on your smartphone or through a headset that’s connected to your computer.

With these benefits associated with softphones, they are ideal choice for mobile or home users, office workers can also choose to use softphones as a convenient replacement for traditional desk phones. This can be problematic for network administrators because the traffic generated by softphones has the potential to flood a network.

Our Recommendation: Bizphone Desktop App, is our latest development application used to make and receive calls on a computer. It is a softphone client that works on either a Windows or Mac desktop.

VOIP (IP) Phones

A VoIP phone, also referred to as an IP phone, is a hardware device using internet protocol rather than the circuit-switched PSTN. In other words, IP phone connects through Ethernet cable instead of a phone jack, where is connects to the IP address of either the VoIP provider or the hosted PBX provider. From a user’s perspective, it works just like a traditional phone, but better with many powerful features analog phone does not support. IP phones come in different shapes with various operating systems from corded IP desk phones to cordless IP telephones, with or without Power over Ethernet (PoE) functionality,  conference or telepresence IP phone… Furthermore, with an extensive pricing range, it’s super easy to find out what suits your business the most.

IP Phones have changed the communications experience in this modernized world, adding new collaboration modes such as HD voice, conferencing, video, and wireless…

Our Recommendations: Some famous IP Phone brands worth mentioning are Fanvil, Cisco, Yealink, Polycom

Mobile Application

Technology has developed to the point where we can talk over the Internet as easily as on the phone. You can get a data signal almost everywhere that you can get a mobile signal. A mobile application, most commonly known as an app, is a type of application designed to run on a mobile device, such as a smartphone or tablet. These mobile apps are generally individual software units with limited function, allows us to make and receive calls via the Internet.

Our Recommendation: BizPhone Mobile (by B3Networks) is a VoIP solution with inbuilt features traditionally supported by IP-PBX only and much more. Professionals constantly on the go can switch between Internet Call and Call Back to make calls and get notified of incoming calls. With our BizPhone you will not miss a call even when you are out of office.

Conclusion

With the key advantages mentioned above, they’re undoubtedly great assistance, cutting costs to advanced functionality that can make both your internal and external communications more efficient.

If you’re new to VoIP, before purchasing a VoIP phone, first try out sipgate with a free VoIP application first (see below). There is no cost to sign up and try us out.