Your voice solution is a mission-critical technology that keeps your organization running smoothly. It keeps your team working together efficiently, allows you to manage customer interactions quickly, and plays a vital role in nearly every aspect of your daily operations.
But the trouble with legacy voice technology is that costs start to accumulate as the equipment ages.
The costs go beyond outlays for new gear and service calls. Here are four ways your outdated voice solution is costing you:
1. Repairing and replacing obsolete hardware
A typical PBX system has a computer controller, a switchboard, networking cables, and phone handsets for each employee. Each device has a finite service life. And just as owning a used car gets more expensive as the years and miles pile up, old phone systems keep racking up expenses.
It’s not just the devices. You also face the costs of calling in service technicians and making piecemeal upgrades to firmware, software, and network components. The gyrations of the business cycle force you to perpetually reconfigure your phone system to add or subtract users.
2. Time
Unless your company designs, builds, and configures voice services, your core interests lie elsewhere. And like most IT leaders, you’re under pressure to get more work done with fewer people.
If your IT employees are constantly resolving support tickets to keep your sinking phone system afloat, then they aren’t applying their expertise to strengthening your core business. The whole point of hiring IT resources is to use their advanced training in computing, storage, networking, and applications to make your company more efficient and profitable.
Your IT staff has only so many hours in the day. The wisest use of their scarce time is solving core business challenges, not fixing phone glitches.
3. Talent
IT professionals are trained to tackle today’s business challenges with the latest computing technology. They didn’t get into IT with the expectation of spending a significant chunk of their day adding user profiles and new phones to an obsolete voice network.
IT pros command some of the highest salaries outside of professions like law, accounting, and medicine. According to Payscale.com, software engineers earn an average of $85,000 a year and up to $121,000 a year or even more depending on local market conditions. Network engineers and project managers often command six-figure salaries.
When you’re paying top dollar for IT expertise, you want to keep your IT people around long enough to recapture the investment. That can be tough to do if you’re feeding them a daily stream of technical busy work rather than challenging them to make the best use of their training and capabilities.
4. Missed opportunities
The more you rely on your phone system, the greater the risk to your business if it fails and customers cannot get through. If it goes down, it’s important to consider the potential cost of a lost opportunity whether that’s a missed call from a prospective client or not being able to join an important conference call. These costs aren’t as easy to calculate, but it’s certainly an important consideration when it comes to evaluating your aging system.
Older, obsolete phone systems also lack the high-powered collaboration features of modern unified communications (UC) systems. With UC technology, your entire organization has access to video chat, screen sharing, autoresponders, sophisticated call forwarding, and integration with customer relationship management (CRM) software that pulls customer data automatically when customers call.
UC technologies give every organization access to tools and capabilities once reserved for corporate giants and massive government agencies. That enables smaller companies to collaborate with people anywhere in the world and outmaneuver their bigger competitors.
Today, Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) moves all these advantages to the cloud, providing new avenues for mobility and cost savings.
How the CBTS Hosted Unified Communications solutions can help
CBTS has a long track record of helping organizations transition to UCaaS, which includes benefits such as:
- Switching from CapEx to OpEx, allowing a predictable monthly usage fee to replace the high costs of buying, configuring, managing, and upgrading voice technologies.
- Enabling always-on connectivity on any device, anywhere.
- Ensuring your organization’s communications system always uses the latest-and-greatest collaboration tools.
- Expanding your flexibility and agility, allowing you to scale up one user at a time as your business grows.
CBTS Hosted Unified Communications has four key components.
- Use video, chat, and other tools to help people work together in any location.
- Contact center. Take customer calls with full functionality hosted in the cloud.
- Call reporting and analytics. Gather data on calls to improve efficiency and visualize trends.
- Call recording. Exceed compliance rules and elevate customer service.
We also provide 24x7x365 support, complete with our respected white-glove service.
Putting all these technologies and capabilities to work improving your business is a major undertaking. It requires the in-depth training and experience that CBTS experts apply to every UCaaS partnership.
Find out how CBTS helped a metal-forming company in Dayton, Ohio, switch from CapEx to OpEx, saving substantial time and money thanks to the CBTS Hosted Unified Communications solution.
Learn more: Unified communications collaboration tools help manufacturer save time and money
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