What Can Your IP PBX Do For You?
A Customer Center entry from August 3, 2007
As the owner of a small or mid-sized business (SMB), it is your responsibility to ensure you are getting maximum production from your staff, which includes making sure you are leveraging your technology to achieve that goal. To that end, you've probably considered replacing your legacy phone system with a new IP PBX system, which would offer enhanced communications features to enable your employees to make the most of their time at work.
But as much as a new IP PBX system can dramatically increase interaction with both colleagues and customers, many potential benefits of the IP PBX are only now becoming evident. For instance, in addition to providing popular communications features for your business, why not deploy an IP PBX that can also support your CRM applications, like those from SugarCRM and Salesforce.com? Or why not ensure your new IP PBX can seamlessly integrate features from popular Web-based applications, like Google Maps, which can help locate and manage potential customers?
By deploying an IP PBX that can integrate your CRM platform, your staff will be able to analyze and manage their sales leads more effectively. For instance, when a call comes in through the IP PBX, the system can be configured to automatically display detailed information about the customer eliminating the time and hassle of having to manually look up the records manually.
In addition, with the growing popularity of Web applications like Google Maps in tracking down customers and leads, the ability to integrate those functions into your IP PBX system can also save time and increase accuracy by eliminating manual data entry and making it easy to locate callers and leads.
By integrating your CRM applications into your IP PBX features, much of the manual work- and the inaccuracy inherent to manual work- can be limited, increasing the effectiveness of you sales force. Indeed, there are a variety of IP PBX offerings available for your SMB, but it is important to ensure your chosen IP PBX can offer the greatest ROI. SMBs, in particular, must be penny-wise, since they have neither the fiscal nor the staffing resources to invest in the wrong system.
By ensuring your IP PBX is based on open standards and able to adapt to a variety of third-party applications without extensive time and costs, you are ensuring your business has a flexible IP PBX solution that will drive business growth. In addition, your IP PBX vendor should be able to provide a turnkey solution so that you don't have to turn to multiple vendors for different pieces of your solution, which would create a more complex and difficult to manage IP PBX environment.
Instead, your IP PBX installation should include the hardware, software, as well as the ability to migrate your office to an all-IP environment at your own pace, in other words, your IP PBX should accommodate both VoIP and traditional telephony.
So, in order to ensure your entire office staff- including your all-important sales personnel- have all the tools they need to increase your company's presence, look for an IP PBX that incorporates not only the latest technologies â found in many IP PBX solutions- but also provides integration with a variety of third-party applications, and is easy to install and maintain. Basically, you are looking for an IP PBX with the latest big business features and capabilities, with an SMB IP PBX price tag.
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Erik Linask is Associate Editor of INTERNET TELEPHONY, IMS Magazine, and Unified Communications. Prior to joining TMC, he was Managing Editor at Global Custodian, an international securities services publication. To see more of his articles, please visit Erik Linask's columnist pages columnist page.
— August 3, 2007
