Back in 2020 you may have migrated quickly to a new phone service, including Teams, as a method to get your staff working quickly and effectively from home.

As these contracts start to renew now is the time to look with a bit more experience at what you actually need.

First, take a look around, do a quick survey of your existing phone system:

  1. How many phones do you need?
  2. How many staff at home, in the office or a mixture of both?
  3. How many people are likely to be on the phone at once?
  4. What do you need to do that you can’t do now?
  5. How much do you spend at the moment?

I’d also recommend spending some time working out which telephony features will really be of benefit to you. In doing this, think about how people in your organisation work.

  1. Do some staff members need to move around a lot within the site?
  2. Do you have groups of people to deal with incoming calls such as finance or HR who aren’t known as an official Contact Centre
  3. How do your customers like to communicate with you – is this through voice or other channels such as social media or email.

And then you need to look at your infrastructure.

  1. Do you have dedicated servers and SBC’s purely for voice
  2. Do you use Azure or AWS for hosting platforms
  3. What are the costs for upgrading and managing these services?

With all this information you’ll be able to make a decision on the best route forward, how the changes will help you, your employees and customers, but you’ll probably still need help from an expert to guide you through the myriad of options.