It could make your head swim, looking over the wide array of options with today's business phone systems. Whether you're a small business just entering the market, or a large business upgrading to a new and feature rich Avaya PBX, the market has really expanded to meet today's demand for constant communication and collaboration.

How you go about buying an integrating a PBX into your business will depend largely on what sort of features and services it provides, as well as how you plan to host it. What sort of internet connectivity does your PBX need? Would you benefit more from having it on site, or having a third party host it? Will you need to have your service handle multiple physical locations, and possibly forward calls to cell phones or other remote locations?

Answering some of these questions can be vital to finding the perfect fit for your business, and its PBX. Let's look at one example of a key feature choice that could add a lot to your business's phone system, and far too often overlooked.

Hiring an operator or receptionist is often times unnecessary, or just unfeasible if you have too many incoming calls. You'll be glad to know that most of the same features can be taken care of by many of the business phone systems these days, and usually can do it better than a human. At the most basic level, these "Auto Attendant" features includes options such as allowing your users to brows through a touchtone activated menu, reach specific extensions or access information recordings. Now if only they had a phone system that will brew a pot of coffee...

Having your phone system perform automated tasks can save you time and money. Auto-dialing provides a means for the system to place calls (and more) all on it's own. At the most basic level, many of us associate PBX auto-dialing with robo-calls, or telemarketing. However, the systems can do much more than that, especially when blended with modern technology. For example, sending text messages to cell phones automated for instant and informative personal, departmental, or company-wide alerts and notices. Voicemail from important numbers can be forwarded instantly, and many packages even provide text to speech for reading messages to the recipient, such as crucial e-mails, news or stock alerts, and more.

If you'd prefer not fit a PBX into your business's physical location, there are hosting options available. Rather than running the system yourself, a hosted PBX is a run remotely, usually leased on a monthly or yearly basis. The advantage is largely that you can take a hands off approach to the system, and have little investment in equipment. Calls can easily be routed to other numbers as well, such as cells and home phones. The flexibility and low equipment investment can make this an attractive option, or one to consider while you weight the benefits of more powerful installations at your place of business.

Making sure your business's telephone system is up to snuff is a crucial factor in ensuring your business's ability to communicate and survive. Delving into the features provided by today's PBX systems is exciting and can bring huge rewards in terms of increasing your business's capabilities, productivity, and overall ability to communicate, whether it be with customers, or inter-office communications.

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Avaya continues to combine hardware as the Avaya the 2400 Series Digital Telephone,Octel 200/300 Message Servers,M770 ATM Switch,C360 Converged Stackable Switch and more with their software products like Avaya One-X,Callmaster and Call Master to create one communication suite.

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Avaya FAQ

Why do I need SIP in my Contact Center?

When you add Avaya IP Agent with integrated Instant Messaging to your Contact Center, your agents have the tools they need to answer the tough calls. They re able to instantaneously see who is free to help whether that expert is some other agent within the Contact Center, a supervisor or manager, or an expert outside the Contact Center.

Now agents are able to immediately provide answers to hard questions from customers. And, it s a valuable learning experience for the agent. The agent gains knowledge and insight into how to answer the hard questions knowledge that would not have been attainable by merely transferring the call to someone else. Next time the agent will be able to answer these questions!

From a customer perspective, the end result of integrating SIP and presence into the Contact Center is a higher number of customers receiving first-call resolution. Increasingly, studies show that first call resolution is an important measure of customer satisfaction. Not only does it create a happier customer experience it reduces the load to your Contact Center. The number of call transfers is reduced , which saves the time it previously took for callers to re-explain their need to a new agent when transferred. You ll see a decrease in overall talk time, enabling you to make better use of valuable agent time. Agents will have more time available to answer other customers faster or to provide other value-added services. For example, agents can proactive contact customers to let your them know about new products or services.

Another popular suite is Avaya Distributed Office delivers rich communication, collaboration and mobility capabilities to branch offices. This centrally managed, SIP-based communications platform easily scales to meet the needs of large enterprises with distributed sites. Advanced applications, such as presence and instant messaging, can now be delivered to every branch, enhancing responsiveness to customers needs. In addition, mobility features support employees on the go, providing effective communications regardless of location. To reduce staff training requirements, Distributed Office offers an optional key system interface. SIP architecture makes scaling to thousands of sites simple, and Avaya can reduce on-site installation time by delivering pre-configured Distributed Office platforms directly to the branch site. In addition, enterprises can leverage intuitive centralized management tools to decrease set up time; manage updates and upgrades; and provision user moves, additions, and changes.