Contact Center On Demand in the Cloud

Cloud communications services are becoming more sophisticated by the day. It’s a natural extension of the cloud computing revolution. Having successfully moved the data servers to the cloud, many companies have eyed the telecom room and wondered why they still need to support that large, expensive and soon to run out of capacity PBX telephone system.

More and more, it makes sense to move business phone operations to the cloud. It all started with Hosted VoIP or Hosted PBX and has expanded from there. The idea behind hosted PBX is that the telephone switching function can be accomplished just as easily from a cloud data center as it can from a back room in your office. The “big iron” hardware goes away, as do the analog, T1 and ISDN PRI telephone trunks. What you keep are handsets now connected to your corporate network and a high bandwidth WAN connection to your service provider.

What do you gain? No more capital investments for one thing. You move to a pricing model of so much per user per month. You also gain a myriad of additional features such as unified communications that include your smartphones, tablets, laptops and PCs into the communications system. Do you have HD voice? Probably not. HD voice is a VoIP technology that expands the transmitted audio band to increase the clarity of your “phone” calls.

Now that Hosted VoIP is a standard practice, the next step is to move the entire contact center to the cloud. XO Communications, a major player in cloud networking services, calls their system “Contact Center On Demand.” Have a look at this short video to see what it’s all about…


What XO will do for you is provide a single integrated solution that includes Hosted PBX and Contact Center on Demand. This is a comprehensive approach to your enterprise communications that gives you the quality and performance you need to support employees and customers with advanced features and a more attractive cost model. The system easily expands to include all of your business locations, along with mobile and remote workers.

What don’t you worry about any more? Equipment obsolescence, planning for large capital investments, limited feature sets, lack of mobile integration, on-going maintenance, inability to ramp up and down to accommodate seasonal spikes in call activity, and managing disaster backup and recovery.

Is your business ready to for more efficient and featured voice communications? Do the comparison between premises based business phone systems and Hosted PBX / Contact Center on Demand services. See what makes the most sense for your operations.

Cloud Hosted IP PBX For Features and Cost Savings

Is this the right time to move your business telephone services to the cloud? You are clearly at a decision point if your current system has run out of capacity, frequently needs repair or is no longer supported. But even if what you have in-house is working fine, you could be missing the opportunity to add productivity features or reduce your communications costs that the latest generation of hosted PBX solutions offer.

A good example is the new version 2.0 Cloud Hosted IP PBX from Airespring called AirePBX. This system completely integrates your fixed and mobile voice communications across all devices and all business locations. That’s important because smartphones are often left out of the loop with traditional PBX systems. If you have branch offices or have grown your business through acquisition, chances are that you have a hodgepodge of telephone equipment unique to each location.

It’s not hard to see how telecom managers can become frustrated when asked to do anything but make voice calls over the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network). With most telephony solutions, the PSTN is the only common denominator. That can leave you wanting for some of the newest and most popular calling features. It can also be a source of unnecessary costs if you must use the public telephone network when you could be using your own data network.

AirePBX, like other hosted VoIP solutions, takes the job of managing a telephone network out of your hands and into a service cloud managed by specialists. With hosted PBX, there is very little in the way of telephone equipment onsite. The PBX goes away. So does all that telephone wiring. You no longer need telephone lines or trunks for outside calls, because that is all handled in the cloud. What you have is telephones that plug right into your LAN and an on-premise enterprise grade session border controller to manage VoIP and data traffic.

What kind of features can you expect with a hosted solution? AirePBX offers HD voice for sound clarity beyond what you think a telephone is capable of. It has a full featured auto attendant, or automated receptionist. With this, even the smallest companies can make a big impression on their customers without having to hire a dedicated operator. You can swap devices mid-call. If someone calls your office phone as you are about to leave your desk, quickly switch the call to your smartphone and continue the conversation on the go. Of course, you also get advanced call routing, find me/follow me, simultaneous ring, caller ID, call forwarding, call park, call transfer, conferencing, fax to email, unified visual voice mail, three-way calling, toll-free numbers, virtual extensions and the ability to manage it all using an online management portal.

Sounds good, but don’t you have to spend a lot of money upgrading your phones? Not at all. AirePBX provides advanced IP desk phones as part of your service at no extra charge. You also get the session border controller at no charge and free professional on-site install. You simply pay per seat per month for the number of phones, “seats”, that you are using. When you need more, you can easily add them. You never pay for capacity that you aren’t using. That alone gives you a business flexibility that you probably don’t have now.

What are the cost savings? AireSpring estimates that you can save up to 50% over the cost of traditional telephone service by moving your PBX or Key System to the cloud. How much can you save? Why not get a quote for cloud hosted IP PBX service from AireSpring and other competitive providers and find out. You could be looking at a major reduction in your communications expenses with better performance as well.

The PBX Disappears With Hosted Voice

Medium and large companies are used to managing their own phone systems. It seems to go without saying that if you want to be able to make inter-office calls, you need to have a PBX or at least Key telephone system in-house. Hosted voice service says quite the opposite. With hosted voice, you only need to provide the phones. Sometimes even those are provided for you.

Hosted Voice, also known as Hosted VoIP or Hosted PBX, is a cloud service. The PBX phone system hasn’t magically disappeared. It’s simply been relocated from your building to the service provider’s.

If this sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because this is the model most companies used about half a century ago. What? You don’t recognize it? Back in the day, we all got our phones from Ma Bell and let her do the switching.

Centralized switching at the local phone company is what built the Bell system. That worked perfectly for residential users and small businesses. Larger companies wanted control of their calling and installed switchboards with operators. Later, when technology enabled it, they tore out the switchboards and installed automatic switching equipment. The phone company had an answer to the PBX. It’s called Centrex. They move the switching back to their “cloud” and handle internal as well as external calls.

There are a number of advantages to dumping the switched circuit model of Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) and moving toward what is known as network voice. What’s changed over the last few decades is that every company now has a computer network. What they may not recognize is that the telephone system is also a network. It’s just a different and very specialized network. Why have two networks when you can combine them and maintain just one network?

It no longer makes sense to add modems to computers so they can run on the telephone network. Computer networks are so large and so fast that they have left voice lines in the dust. Instead, it makes more sense to modify telephones so that they can run on the computer networks. Telephones that have this capability are called IP phones or SIP phones. SIP is the switching system used by VoIP telephone systems.

The term VoIP or Voice over IP describes the nature of this system. You are transporting telephone calls, or voice, over IP Networks. Your LAN is an IP network. The IP stands for Internet Protocol, regardless of whether it is connected to the actual Internet or not.

This is how hosted voice works. Your PBX and analog telephones are hauled away for salvage or resale. In their place you get brand new IP phones that you unpack and plug into your network just like you would a computer or a printer. Then you pick up the phone to place a call and...

Oh, wait. You can’t make a call until you get a phone line to your network. That line is called a SIP Trunk. The SIP Trunk is what connects you to your service provider. At your end is a voice gateway installed by the service provider. At the far end is their very large telephone switching system, called a soft switch, and all the outside phone trunks that connect it to the public telephone system.

There’s a caveat here. Some smaller businesses try to cheap out and use the Internet to provide the connection to their phone service provider. That’s a pretty dicey arrangement because the Internet doesn’t offer any QoS or Quality of Service mechanisms. Your voice packets and the neighborhood kid’s pirated movie packets are all jammed together with no priority for anyone. If traffic backs up, it’s just like the tollway at rush hour. Everything creeps along and your phone conversations get choppy. They might even drop completely.

The best practice is to get your SIP Trunk from the same company that is providing your hosted voice service. They will give you a line that serves up telephone calls and the Internet without any interference between the two. As a single provider, they are responsible for both the line and the phone service. They’ll manage this arrangement to make sure both work optimally.

Regardless of the size of your business, it is well worth your while to investigate the features and cost savings from hosted voice solutions. Savings can be as high as 50% and you may be able to include your mobile phones as well as your office phones.