People are constantly interconnected and exchanging valuable, important information. Keeping these communications flowing, at the heart of your business is the PBX, ensuring employees and clients alike are able exchange information. Before diving in though, there are a few things you should consider.

It's not like deciding on your long distance carrier or cell phone. In those markets, the options are limited and it's mostly one size fits all.

As with all else, the business world moves at a different pace. This is one of those decisions that changes everything, determining your ability to scale with future needs and expansion, your ability to leverage the power of the internet in your communications network (with technologies like VoIP,) and your ability to remain bulletproof and immune to services outages, with things like battery backup UPS systems and remote administrative capabilities. With your business phone system playing such a vital role, let's take a look at a thing or two that you might need to keep in mind.

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 the caller to navigate a (potentially huge) menu system, reach specific extensions or access information recordings. Now if only they had a PBX 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, with tasks like sending text messages to cell phones automated for instant and informative personal, departmental, or company-wide alerts and notices. Recordings or messages can be delivered as well, 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.

Modern software has seen a flood of high quality open-source development, and the PBX market is no exception. The "Asterisk" project is a suite of high powered, feature rich software PBX tools, very popular with many businesses. The software runs on a standard PC, along with specialized interface cards to connect you to the outside phone system (including everything from standard phone lines, through ISDN or T1 lines.) Features are rich, including robo-dialing, auto-operator menu systems, voicemail, voice over IP, and much more.

Rather than run this yourself, you an also opt for devices powered by Asterisk, of which many can be found. This can give you many of the rapid development, security, and plugin benefits of Asterisk, without the chore and hassle of trying to install and manage the software on a computer, yourself.

"Can you hear me now?" isn't something you want your customers or employees to have to utter. Making sure you're able to keep in touch around the office, and with the outside world is a very real and serious demand of modern business. Choosing a good, well rounded PBX to drive your business phone system will ensure that you're not only able to keep voice communications flowing, but will also allow seamless integration with other modern technology, such as email and text messaging.

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