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Finding the Right Business Phone System?
KodaK asks: "I've recently been hired by a small-but-growing financial firm to be their systems administrator (Non ex transverso sed deorsum), now they want me to evaluate and recommend telephone systems. They want call reporting, and they also want visual call management. I've looked at Asterisk, and while I'd love to play with a system like that, I'm not skilled enough to put together what they want out of it in the timeframe they need, so I've been looking at PBX systems like the Alcatel OmniPCX Enterprise and Artisoft Televantage. However, I don't know enough about phone systems to effectively evaluate them. What should I be looking for? Are there really any differences, or are they all pretty much the same? The Artisoft is Windows 2000 based and that scares me from an availability standpoint (hey, VXWorks is /designed/ to be 5 nines, you can't say that about Windows). The Alcatel is Linux at the core, but is that really meaningful when there's other systems out there designed from the ground up to be telephone systems? Any suggestions? Any warnings? I'd appreciate any information or advice you can give me on any phone systems, not just the Alcatel and Artisoft. I want to make sure I'm making the right recommendation when there's a $30k plus investment involved."
Ack! Nooooo!
Your local telco will try to sell you something called "centrex"-- which is basically them managing your phone system for you by partitioning off a section on their local class 5 switch.
This sucks because:
- You have to get your local telco to fix the problem whenever you have one... during business hours... whenever they feel like getting around to it.
- If you EVER want to change ANY settings, they have to do it for you... even little things like moving an extension from one office to another.
I think the only advantage of Centrex is that everyone has a DID (direct-inward-dial) number... but really if you want that, you can get that with any phone system.
If you tell them that you don't want centrex but still want a suggestion, you'll probably just end up with whoever their partner is. Remember they want to make money here, not help you.
Regarding the other suggestion above, that you call other companies customer service and ask them what they use-- Let me tell you what I've found from this in my own experience.
On the off chance that you get to talk to someone with technical expertise by calling into a huge company's customer service number, you may get a good idea of the user experience with the phone, but certainly not the management experience.
Also, it is not a good idea to pick your system based on taking a poll of what other companies are using for their call centers. In MANY large organizations (as the commentor correctly stated), the phone system is a very lucrative contract that goes to some VP's nephew who is a rep for Avaya or something with hardly any research. In other cases, when a company (say, American Express) goes out and buys themselves a phone system even with a lot of research, you have to understand that 1) they have a lot more bargaining power than you do, and 2) their needs are far different from yours... even if it seems like the same application.
As for magazines... try "Call Center". Its one of the better industry journals, but I didn't really find it all too helpful when I had to find a phone system for my company.
I disagree: centrex service is actually pretty nice IF you're not utterly dependent on phone service (not a call center, etc.) and you don't want/don't need a dedicated telecom admin.
The "you have to get them to fix problems" argument isn't a good one if you have nobody in-house who can fix problems. It's better if the phone company fixes a problem in an hour than if your sysadmin has to spend an hour reading the manual each time there's a problem. I've also seen very few problems with the centrex systems where I've worked, but that's obviously related to the quality of your local provider.
The "they have to do everything for you" is also an advantage if you don't want to do it yourself.
Forward, retransmit, or republish anything I say here. Just don't misquote me.