Are you thinking of moving your phone system from a legacy private branch exchange (PBX) to the cloud? Whether or not you should move to a cloud PBX is a big question, so let’s break it into smaller ones. Here’s what you need to ask yourself to determine whether moving to a cloud PBX is right for your business.
Do You Want to Save Money?
If your entire phone system is managed and hosted in the cloud, you immediately cut out a significant chunk of your hardware budget. You just pay for the service you get. Moreover, if your organization is dispersed over different offices, work-from-home locations, different cities, or even different continents, you still get to consolidate your whole phone system into one place, reducing your average cost per call.
How Much Time Do You Want to Spend on Your PBX?
With a cloud PBX, provisioning is instant. A few clicks and you have ten new seats. Also, your service provider takes care of the server maintenance, equipment upgrades, and other essential 24/7 technical stuff.
Do You Want to Keep Your Existing Phone System?
If you’ve ever managed a big technical change at the office, you know that people’s reaction can be fraught, and said reaction can be a big factor in whether or not you want to get a whole new phone system. However, you may not have to change everything if you switch to a cloud PBX. If your existing phone system supports SIP trunking or VoIP, you might be able to keep it and still go with the cloud. You could end up keeping parts of the legacy system, for familiarity reasons, and pick up the benefits of a cloud PBX on the back-end of your system.
Do You Need a “Phone” System That Uses Any Device?
Do you take calls on your business’s desk phone—but also on smartphones and computers? Are you travelling overseas but need to take calls from the same number, take office calls from home or transit, and generally move around a lot? A cloud PBX has the flexible tools that make all this possible. Your business and your employees are mobile by default; your phone system should be mobile by default too.
Do You Want More Collaboration Features?
Your team should not only be able to effortlessly communicate with each other, but effortlessly collaborate with each other. It’s hard to imagine modern communications without video meetings, presence, and instant messaging. But you don’t need third party apps; these features can be layered right on top of your hosted PBX platform.
Do You Need to Scale Your Business Easily?
With a cloud PBX, it’s easy to add lines or remove them with a few clicks at the online portal. And you get billed based on your service, so that part is easy too. A cloud PBX is extremely scalable.
Are You Concerned with Redundancy, Emergency Preparedness, & Disaster Recovery?
If your phone system is hosted on the cloud, you get better protection from hardware failures, natural disasters, and other emergencies. Providers have their own redundancy infrastructure, with equipment in different places around the country (or world). Even in the case of serious natural disaster, alternate routes through the cloud are found in seconds, letting you keep up business as usual.
Do You Need to Monitor Your System in Real-Time?
The monitoring tools that come with a cloud PBX are great for monitoring your system in real-time and for collecting data about usage. Your IT can easily spot problems as they happen, and you can see all the information you need to understand how your system is being used and what can be improved.
Do You Want Better Customer Engagement?
Three quarters of customers have stopped doing business with a brand due to poor customer experience. An essential way to stop poor customer experience is with excellent communication, and using a Cloud PBX can help. A Cloud PBX can ensure that your customers get routed quickly to the right person, irrespective of whether that person is at their desk or somewhere else. Also, because of the aforementioned real-time monitoring, you can easily see what kind of wait times customers are experiencing and whether they’re being directed properly with a minimum of moves. And of course, if you’re noting that wait times are consistently long, you can easily scale your system to include more customer representatives with a couple of mouse clicks.
Do You Need an Extra Layer of Security?
Who doesn’t need more security? If you have a cloud PBX, the security team for your service provider is looking at things too. Obviously, your in-house IT team has their own security measures, but it never hurts to have another team keeping an eye on things, especially something as important as your phone system.
So Is Cloud PBX Right for Your Business?
If you found yourself answering yes to many of these questions, perhaps it’s time to move your PBX to the cloud. It’s never been easier to reach out and get a quote.
