Although your business may be ready to move toward the future, your phone system is most probably inflexible, unsecured, and stuck in the past. Traditional phone systems have not and cannot keep up with the needs of the modern workforce. Most of these traditional systems also come with costly phone maintenance contracts.
Cloud offers a number of advantages.
With cloud solutions, you are always up-to-date with the latest version of the product you are using, meaning your organisation is always benefitting from improvements and new features, without having to make any updates yourself.
A cloud phone system will save you money on installation and maintenance fees and because you will be able to access a multi-tenant cloud environment, you can be assured of high availability, business continuity and fully up to date functionality. What’s more, cloud will deliver true scalability for your business, allowing you to add and remove services when you need to, plus add features and functions as your business grows and changes.
The transition to a cloud phone solution needs to be properly planned and executed. While the steps involved in moving can vary greatly, a typical deployment has three key phases.
- Assessment and Implementation
This phase can take up to several months and will consider a number of aspects of your business and future requirements, including:
- Is the solution for a single office or multiple offices?
- Is the business moving toward a more mobile solution, i.e. remote working?
- Is there sufficient bandwidth available for a new phone system?
- How will internal and external calls be managed?
During this phase, your provider should also undertake a physical site survey and ensure they thoroughly assess your current infrastructure and system configuration.
- Number Porting
This involves moving your existing telephone numbers from your current carrier to your cloud provider. The process itself can take up to two months (or longer!) as it can take this long to get an appointment date scheduled by the carrier. And a note of caution, any errors due to incorrect information provided by you, such as a different entity name from the one used on your bill; can affect the time frame. Temporary solutions are available which will help your business avoid the long wait during number porting to get your solution up and running.
- Deployment, installation and training
This is the final phase of the transition to a cloud phone system. It involves either onsite configuration or the remote installation of your service including number porting and cloud-app integrations. For 90% of deployments the installation is usually completed in one business day.
Providers will also deliver end user customer training at this time and give companies access to all documentation such as user guides, quick-reference guides, and access to user portals.
Learn more about our cloud phone system offering, which helps businesses connect, communicate and collaborate. See our indicative transition guide here
Contact the specialist team at UC7 today to find out more. 1300 UC7 777