These are heady days for the telecommunications industry. Rarely does a month go by without some new innovation in small business phone systems, powered by the convergence of modern technology and ever-expanding Internet services.
So, what's on the horizon? Let's take a look forward at the technologies we think are going to have the most impact in the coming year. These may not be features you need to look at implementing immediately, but they're ones you'll want to keep an eye on... especially if you find out your competition is deploying them!
Three Advances In Business Phone Systems To Watch
I. Presence
“Presence” simply refers to information embedded within a communications system that indicates a person's ability to receive communications. If you've ever used a standard chat client like AIM or Google Chat, these implement basic presence functionality by allowing users to set themselves as “invisible,” away, or available.
Modern corporate phone systems, such as ADTRAN's NetVanta Unified Communications solutions, expand this functionality to cover every employee and every device they might be available through. This can be brought to the desktop, allowing every employee to quickly see the status of whoever they need to communicate with. Additionally, it can automatically give them options for voicemail or text messaging, if the recipient is busy or outside of a service area.
This greatly speeds communications, as well as encouraging your employees to make full use of your unified communications system.
II. Integrated Corporate Instant Messaging
Speaking of instant messaging, we have come a long way since the days of AIM! The form of the messenger is still similar, but its functionality in business applications is expanding
rapidly.
Your employees can now quickly and easily search a full directory internal resources, and have their IM platform connect to any other through nearly any medium. IM can be integrated into voice communications, voice mail, and text messaging so that messages can be delivered to virtually any employee at any time. Thanks to Unified Communications, these features can be activated directly through the software. They don't even have to dial the phone themselves.
The integration of text-to-speech features even allows IMs to be delivered as digitized voice messages.
III. Streamlined IVR Engines
The traditional IVR still hasn't gone away, although it continues to be refined. IVR can now be implemented across your operations. The key is that the process of creating IVRs has been streamlined to the point that virtually anyone in your operation with need can create one.
An IVR used to require extensive programming, as well as its own data set and pre-recorded messages. Now, through those same text-to-speech technologies, an IVR system can be built quickly and easily through a Windowed computing environment, with no programming knowledge necessary.
They are far simpler to create, and yet can be far more robust than older systems. As part of
a Unified Communications platform, they have access to the same data that's on the network and can be quickly inserted into the existing phone systems which are installed. Whether it's your IT department setting up a self-help section for internal calls, or a worker simply creating options for contacting him while on vacation, IVRs can be leveraged at all levels of your organization.
The Power of Unified Communications
The key to all this, of course, is having a unified platform. That's a tall order for many companies who have been building their networks piecemeal since the 90s. However, just as railway gauges and telephone lines eventually standardized in the name of efficiency, the same has happened here. Piecemeal works, but it's just not the optimal way of setting up a network.
Your opportunity to revamp your entire small business phone systems may not come immediately, but when it does, remember what unified communications can do throughout your organization.
