End of the Premises Contact Center

By: John Shepler

Business telephone operations have changed a bit over the years. Single line phones soon gave way to the switchboard with live operators to direct calls. Automation replaced the switchboard with the receptionist backed up by a key telephone PBX (Private Branch Exchange) phone system. Call centers with dozens or hundreds of agents performing customer service developed specialized version of PBX systems with integration of computers and telephones. Still, one thing remained constant over the decades of technology evolution. The facilities all remained on-premises.

What’s Wrong With Premises Equipment?
The idea of keeping everything in-house has a appeal to it. After all, if you have the equipment right under your nose, you have complete control of how it works, who gets to use it and what services are available. You might even get lulled into the notion that in-house means much higher reliability than facilities located somewhere out there.

With premises based facilities you do have the ability to take a look at the system whenever you like. You can even give it a love pat from time to time just for good luck.

Along with this ability, you also pick up some responsibilities. You have to provide space, reliable power, connections to each and every phone and on-going maintenance. You didn’t think that these things ran themselves, did you? You also didn’t think that they came free of charge? No, sir. There are some major bucks involved with setting up a call center or contact center phone system and keeping it up to date.

Moving on Up to the Cloud
Unlike the last century or so, today you have the option of being able to run an efficient contact center while unloading the equipment burden. Where does it all go? To the cloud, of course.

Not everything, mind you, but the core system relocates to a remote data center. What you are left with are the actual telephones and computers that you can’t do without. But with a cloud based system, those phones and computers can be scattered around the globe and even at home for some agents, yet all connected as if they were in the same building.

More that Cost Savings
Cloud based contact centers have the obvious advantage of eliminating a major money pit in the form of PBX equipment, software and on-going maintenance. That means less tech support needed at your end. The service provider takes over the support function and handles tech issues 24/7. You may not have been able to even afford this level of scrutiny in-house.

The cloud also has its own benefits. What’s different about a cloud-based system is that a dedicated service prover builds a massive technical plant way beyond what any single company could justify. The benefit to you is that you can likely expand or contract your use of the system at will. If business grows you add more seats and pay for them one by one. If business goes into a tailspin, you eliminate the seats you don’t need.

Another cloud benefit is that you get the latest technology, including features that your in-house system probably can’t provide. That includes individual user features but also major infrastructure like redundant data centers. With duplicated facilities running in parallel, if one center goes down for any reason, the other picks up the load invisibly to you. That translates to higher availability. One vendor, inContact, boasts 99.99% availability.

Tools for Higher Productivity
The inContact suite of tools includes ACD (Automatic Call Distribution) with skills-based routing, IVR (Interactive Voice Response) with speech recognition, CTI (Computer Telephone Integration), predictive , progressive and preview dialers, call recording, extensive reporting, quality monitoring and Workforce Optimization tools.

Sure, you might develop an ad-hoc solution in-house that could provide similar functions, but you’re looking at a substantial development process that sucks up time and money and then YOU have to keep it all running and make improvements over the years. Why re-invent the wheel when the latest in call center efficiency is available for your use right now and can grow with your needs?

Do you have a stand alone call center or a contact center as part of your core business that includes 15 or more “agents” on the phones? If so, cloud based communications
may be exactly what you need right now.


Note: Original photo of telephone operators courtesy of Seattle Municipal Archives on Wikimedia Commons.

How Does a VoIP Call Work?

VoIP telephony is in the process of displacing traditional landlines, include digital trunks such as T1 and ISDN PRI. What is it that is different about VoIP phone calls and what advantages does this technology offer?

You’ll hear VoIP referred to as a network service rather than a telephone service. This is an important distinction for network engineers and business owners, but not of much concern to users. One telephone set looks pretty much like another. When you lift the handset, you expect to hear dial tone and be able to dial out. When the phone rings, you expect to pick up the handset and hear the party on the other end and have a conversation.

A lot of engineering work has gone into making VoIP phone calls mimic traditional landline telephone calls as much as possible. The ideal has been that you shouldn’t be able to tell a difference. Now that this goal has been generally achieved, the new ideal is to make VoIP calls sound more lifelike than anything you’ve heard through a telephone. It’s something called HD or high definition voice.

The telephone connection is what determines whether you are using traditional telephony or VoIP. A traditional analog telephone line is based on technology that goes back over a century. It consists of two copper wires twisted together that connect a particular phone all the way to the telephone company office and into the central switching system. This line has certain AC and DC voltages and other characteristics. Often the phone line provides power to the telephone set. The phone itself has evolved from electromechanical components to relatively simple electronics. It just needs to have the proper characteristics to interface with the analog line.

This carries over to in-house telephone systems such as Key telephones or Private Branch Exchange (PBX). These are small switching systems that handle internal calls to keep them off the public telephone network. The in-house phone system connects to each phone in the company with a pair of wires that mimic the line from the phone company.

VoIP uses your company computer network as its phone line. For this to work, the phone has to include circuitry that makes it look like a network peripheral and be compatible with everything else on the network, including computers, printers, servers and so on. Phones that do this are called IP phones or SIP phones. They have a standard RJ-45 Ethernet jack on the back of the phone to connect to the network. They can be powered over this same connection by special POE (Power over Ethernet) switches or have separate plug-in power supplies to operate the internal electronics.

Smaller companies and residential users of VoIP can use regular telephone sets by plugging them into an ATA or Analog Telephone Adapter. This adapter has the electronics that you would find inside an IP Telephone.

VoIP gets its name from Voice over Internet Protocol. That doesn’t mean it has to run on the Internet, although some low cost VoIP services do use the Internet as your line to the service provider in order to save money. IP or Internet Protocol describes the technology used by Ethernet Local Area Networks. It’s what makes the Internet work and also runs many networks that don’t connect to the public Internet.

Actually, it’s easier to achieve high voice quality by avoiding the public Internet completely and connecting to your phone service provider through an extension of your network called a SIP Trunk. SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) is the switching technology for VoIP systems. The SIP Trunk takes the place of the analog, T1 or ISDN PRI telephone line that normally goes to the local telephone company.

You can set up a VoIP telephone system in your company that shares your computer network, including any WAN (Wide Area Network) connections between business locations. You’ll install a IP PBX to handle switching calls between office phones and connect to your service provider for outside lines. A newer option is to skip the IP PBX and rent Hosted PBX telephone switching from the same service provider that connects you to the public phone system. This saves a major investment and allows you to add more phones as you need them.

Are you considering installing a new business phone system or expanding or replacing one you already have? Get features and pricing for hosted PBX and telephone trunking optionsto help decide what makes the most sense for your company.

Hosted VoIP Solutions Include New Phones

When we think of cloud services, it’s fairly easy to imagine the server racks down the hall being replaced by a much larger set somewhere out there. Similarly, it’s easy to see that the PBX in the telecom room disappears one day to be replaced by a much larger hosted PBX system in the cloud. But what about all those phone wires that used to plug into the PBX FSX and FSO ports? What do they plug into now?

They need to do what the network connections do. Moving data servers outside is made easier by connecting the LAN to an edge router that has a high capacity WAN line to your cloud service provider. When you outsource the PBX, the same thing needs to happen. In this case, the connection is called a SIP Trunk. Yes, it’s possible to terminate the SIP trunk into a myriad of analog phone ports so you can just plug in the phones you now have and keep going as if nothing has changed. But if you do that, you’ll miss out on one of the big advantages of upgrading to Hosted PBX service. That’s all the special features enterprise VoIP has to offer.

A big cost saver with VoIP, especially for medium and large organizations, is the consolidation of the separate phone and computer networks into one converged voice and data network. The phones are now like computer peripherals. There’s an RJ-45 jack on the back that connects to the network just like a PC. The phone has its own MAC address. You can move it around on the network and still have it ring at the same phone number. Forget rewiring or reprogramming like you have to do with standard phones when you make changes.

Analog phones can be made to work like IP phones by using an adaptor box called an ATA (Analog Telephone Adaptor). This is something of a kludge because the phone still has only the rudimentary features it had before. That’s why the ATA approach is only used for residential, home office and very small business situations. For every other application, the right thing to do is bite the bullet and move up to IP phones, also called SIP phones. These are telephones designed to run on the converged network and make use of productivity features you can get with networked telephony.

If you are designing your own in-house enterprise grade VoIP telephone system, you’ll need to budget for new phones as well as the IP PBX equipment. Count up the number of desks and wall phones, multiply by the cost of each IP Phone at several hundred dollars per, and your eyes may pop out at the total investment required. You can put together a capital investment plan and go face the bankers or take the alternative approach of pay-as-you-go.

Who let’s you pay by the month for your complete telephone service? Hosted PBX providers, that’s who. The pay for usage model is what’s making cloud computing such a hot service these days. There’s no reason telephony can’t be put on the same basis. The one variable is the telephone sets that remain at your business, not in the cloud. You can buy those, of course, or you can have the lease cost included in your per-seat pricing for the system. That way you get brand new sophisticated desk phones that are guaranteed to be compatible with the hosted phone service. You also have one provider to deal with for everything. If you’ve ever had to referee between phone set manufacturers and carriers blaming each other for something not working, you’ll recognize the advantage of having “one neck to wring.”

Would you like to avoid the never-ending capital appropriation and procurement cycle in favor of just paying for what you need as you need it? Hosted VoIP may be the way to go for your business. Get competitive quotes and features for hosted VoIP telephone systems and compare with the what you have now.

Business VoIP Solution Options

You may be considering a move from a traditional analog or PBX business phone system to VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol telephony. Before you jump into a major “forklift upgrade,” you should know that there are a number of good business VoIP solutions to consider. Which one you pick will depend on your particular situation. Pick the right one and you’ll get the most for your telephony dollar.

Why even consider VoIP in the first place? The reason is to save money, add calling features or both. Let’s start with the needs of very small businesses and work our way up to enterprise solutions.

The smaller businesses will have one to four outgoing phone lines and under 10 handsets. This is typical of small sales offices, retail stores and independent professionals. You may well be using individual analog phone lines and perhaps 2 or 4 line phones that you can buy at office supply stores.

A system this small doesn’t justify a PBX phone system or PRI digital trunking. But you do have the option to change to a broadband phone or SIP trunking solution. Broadband phone is typified by the Phone Power VoIP service. You connect a device called an ATA or Analog Telephone Adaptor to your broadband service, typically Cable Internet, and plug one or two telephones plus your computer or router into the ATA. You no longer need an analog telephone line because your broadband connection is used for both phone and Internet. A typical small office VoIP service plan costs $14.95 a month, but temporary special offers can make this even cheaper.

A step up from single phone number VoIP is called SIP trunking. This service uses a T1 line or other business grade private line to provide multiple line telephone service plus broadband to a small to medium size business. By using dynamic bandwidth management, phone calls have all the bandwidth they require for maximum call quality. Remaining bandwidth is assigned to Internet access. As calls hang up, the bandwidth they were using is automatically or dynamically reassigned for Internet service. This way the full capacity of the line is always put to good use.

Companies large enough to have an in-house key telephone or PBX system generally have many handsets and at least 6 to 10 outside lines. If your system is getting to the end of its useful life, you have the choice of replacing it with a newer IP PBX system or going with a hosted PBX solution. Hosted PBX means that you don’t have any PBX equipment in-house. Your service provider connects to SIP telephones or analog phones with adaptors on your LAN and performs both the internal and external call switching.

Enterprise VoIP telephony also consists of using SIP telephones in place of regular telephone handsets. These SIP phones allow you to converge your telephone and computer networks into a single LAN for both voice and data. You can choose to host an IP PBX system in-house or elect to go with a hosted PBX solution. The tradeoff is capital equipment cost and online maintenance versus paying a monthly fee to a service provider. Think of hosted PBX as a cloud service for business telephony. Even if you install and operate your own IP PBX system, you still have the option to use SIP trunking to connect with a service provider that will terminate outside calls to the public telephone system. The more traditional solution is to use ISDN PRI telephone trunks for the same purpose.

Which VoIP solution, if any, make the most sense for your organization? There are a lot of variables involved and many suppliers. Why not let an experienced Telarus telecom consultant help you compare costs and features of business VoIP solutions? Then make an informed decision to get the most for your telecom budget.

Toll Free Number Availability Now

You’re thinking about getting a toll free number for your business, but, oh, the grief involved in trying to find one that’s available and then having to send in a bunch of paperwork and waiting a couple of weeks or a couple of months to get service. Is that really worth it?

NO. It certainly is not, and why should you? There are toll free numbers all set up and ready to go right now. All you have to do is pick the one you want from a list of choices and then take about 5 minutes to get your service started. You do all this online at Kall8’s Instant Online Activation site. No need to wait for standard business hours. Get your number tonight, on the weekend, any holiday, or any time at all. The process is totally automated and self-service. As soon as you are set up, you can start using your new toll free number.

So how much does this all cost and what do you get? How’s $2 to get your 866, 877 or 888 toll free number? Not bad, huh? For every month that you want to keep that number, your credit card will get charged another $2. When customers or prospects call you on that number, you’ll pay just 6.9 cents a minute for the length of the call. Rates are a bit higher for Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, US Virgin Islands, Guam and Saipan. I’ll bet you didn’t even know that you could take toll free calls from those locations, did you?

Sounds cheap enough, but what do you get in the way of service? First of all, you get the ability to change your ring-to number at will. That’s a powerful feature if you aren’t always at the same phone. For instance, many professionals and small business owners on the go will have the toll free number ring to their cell phone when they are not in the office. That way, they will never miss an important call... or that all-important chance to close a sale. If you are going to be in the office all day, change the ring-to number so that all incoming toll free calls will ring your office phone. At night, set it to ring your home phone. You’ll never have to “check in” to see if you got any important calls. They’ll come directly to you wherever you are.

Of course, you get voice mail with your toll free number. After all, there are always some times when you can’t answer the phone. But, this voice mail can be checked online or you can even have voice messages sent to you as email attachments. The same is true with FAX messages. Just have your clients send the FAX to your toll free number. The Kall8 system will turn it into an electronic image and send that to you as an email attachment. Or, you can get your FAX messages online at any time.

There are many other features, such as conference calling, call blocking and forwarding, and Caller ID, and they are all included for the same price: $2 a month plus the cost of calls.

TelePacific’s SmartVoice Trunking Offers Telephone Smarts

TelePacific Communications has a clever and sophisticated solution for small and medium size businesses that need telephone and Internet service. It’s a SIP trunking solution that offers both voice and data on a single telecom line. What distinguishes their SmartVoice service is that it can accommodate different kinds of business telephone systems and offers a lot more traffic capacity than Integrated T1 lines.

SIP trunking is an IP-based transmission line designed to support enterprise VoIP telephone systems. SIP is Session Initiation Protocol, the signaling technology used by many IP phone systems. Since IP networks transport voice and data packets equally well, many SIP trunking providers offer a combination of telephone and Internet service on the trunk line.

TelePacific’s SmartVoice Trunking also offers a combination of telephone and Internet service. The system is set up so that any bandwidth not being used for telephone calls is dynamically allocated to Internet bandwidth. If another phone call takes place, that call gets a priority on the bandwidth it needs to ensure voice quality.

Now here’s something different. An Integrated T1 line will do this, but only up to its capacity of 1.5 Mbps. That’s typically no more than a dozen simultaneous phone calls with 750 Kbps of broadband Internet. SmartVoice Trunking bonds multiple T1 lines together to create a single SIP trunk line. Up to 4 T1 lines can be bonded to create a path bandwidth of 6 Mbps.

The significance of all this bandwidth is that larger businesses or telephone-intensive operations, such as customer contact centers, can have up to 48 simultaneous phone conversations through their IP PBX and SIP Network connection. Perhaps you don’t need that many phones, but do need the bandwidth for broadband Internet access to support many users. The Dedicated Internet Access on the SmartVoice trunk gives you the bandwidth you need without the necessity of paying for completely separate telephone and Internet lines.

SmartVoice also supports a wide variety of business telephone systems. The latest IP PBX phone systems are supported, of course, but so are standard PRI and CAS trunks for traditional digital PBX systems. You can even connect analog handsets or your key telephone system with capacity for anywhere from 4 to 24 outside lines.

What sort of advanced features does SmartVoice support? Caller ID is standard. You can also get up to 100 DID or Direct Inward Dial numbers so that each employee has their own phone number and there is no need to go through a receptionist. A feature set just added is hunt groups. With hunting, if one person doesn’t answer the call it will go on to the next person in line on a linear or circular pattern. Circular hunting allocates incoming sales calls to the sales staff on a round-robin basis so that every sales person gets a fair share of the prospects. There are other patterns you can set also.

Does this sound like the kind of telecommunications service that would benefit your company? If so, talk to an expert consultant and get a quick quote on SmartVoice and other cost effective voice and data solutions.

PBX Telephone Connection Services

PBX or Private Branch Exchange telephone systems are ubiquitous in medium and larger businesses, call centers, customer contact centers and any business with lots of telephones. The PBX really has two jobs. One is to manage all the phones in the organization for internal calls. The other is to manage all the outside phone lines so that they are shared efficiently among all users. What you want is the right number and type of lines to conduct business efficiently at the least cost.

There are multiple types of lines and also several technologies to consider. You can choose from local or long distance service, incoming or outgoing or bidirectional, and toll free line services. But you can also choose the connection technology. These include analog, switched circuit digital, and IP-based digital.

Analog telephone service has been the mainstay of telephony for over a century. It’s so mature and familiar that it’s known in the industry as POTS or Plain Old Telephone Service. POTS connects by a single copper twisted pair directly from your location to the telco central office. It uses a combination of DC and AC voltages to give you dial tone, rotary and touch-tone dialing, full duplex conversations, and on-off hook signaling. POTS also supports Caller ID.

One POTS line supports one telephone conversation, but it can support more than one telephone set. A very common arrangement is 2 to 4 POTS lines connected to a 2 or 4 line business phone. Multiple phones can make use of these lines, but you need to look for a line-in-use light to know if a phone line is free for your use. When you expand to 4 to 8 lines, you’ll probably install a key telephone system that allows the various phone sets to communicate internally without using an outside line. This system still uses indicator lights to show which lines are in use. You have to manually select an available line to make a call.

PBX systems are computer-based telephone controllers that take over the job of managing outside phone lines. You can connect as many POTS lines as you need to the PBX. When someone requests an outside line by dialing “9”, the system will use the next available line. Users don’t have to worry about selecting lines themselves.

PBX systems also offer a way to reduce your telephone service costs by using digital trunking services instead of POTS. You need 6 to 12 outside lines at a minimum for this to be cost effective. Instead of installing a dozen POTS lines to your PBX system, you plug in a single T1 telephone line that supports up to two dozen phone lines on a single “trunk” line.

The most popular switched-circuit telephone trunk that replaces multiple POTS lines is called ISDN PRI. ISDN is a digital telephony standard, PRI stands for Primary Rate Interface. This service is delivered over a T1 line, so it is also called T1 PRI. What you get is up to 23 outside lines that you can specify to be incoming, outgoing, local, long distance, etc. There is also a signaling and data channel that provides rapid connections and Caller ID services for each line.

A recently developed service called SIP Trunking is based on IP networks used for converged voice and data services. A SIP Trunk can carry both broadband Internet and VoIP telephone services between your location and your service provider. SIP trunks may have a cost advantage, especially if you can use a single T1 line for both voice and data.

Interestingly, both traditional PBX systems and the newer IP PBX systems can connect to POTS, ISDN PRI or SIP Trunks. You need the appropriate interface card, of course, but many systems offer multiple interfaces built-in. If you need more lines, you add one or more additional interface cards.

With all these options, what is the most cost effective solution for your business telephone needs? The best solution will be based on your specific usage patterns and the latest offers from multiple competitive carriers. That’s too much information to digest by simply shopping around. A better way is to use a combination of an automated search process and expert consultants. Both are available for your use at no cost at T1 Rex. Use the online GeoQuote (tm) or call the toll free number for immediate service, and see how much you can save compared to what your phone services currently cost.

T-1 Digital Phone Lines For PBX Systems

Most business telephone systems that have more than a few outside lines now use T-1 trunk lines to connect from your building to the local telephone office. Why? Because the value in consolidating many individual phone lines into a single or a couple of T-1 lines makes digital lines more cost effective than a collection of analog phone lines. This is true regardless of whether your in-house phone system uses analog or digital phones. Even most VoIP based phone systems terminate calls in T-1 telephone lines.

Very simple one and two line phones or key telephone systems with 4 to 6 outside lines are set up for analog phone lines. The simple VoIP services use an analog phone adapter to connect to DSL broadband service to provide 1 or 2 lines. That's pretty much the extent of what you can do with these simple systems. Once you get more than a half-dozen outside phone lines, you should be looking at T-1 service as a cost saver.

There are several flavors of T-1 line services to be aware of. A standard T-1 telephone trunk offers up to 24 individual phone lines all digitized and multiplexed into two pair of copper wires that connect back to the telco central office. Your PBX system needs a T-1 interface card to connect to a T-1 line. These are pretty much a standard option for any new PBX phone system and you can likely order a plug-in T-1 card for older systems.

A variation on the T-1 line is called an ISDN PRI or T-1 PRI phone line. PRI stands for Primary Rate Interface and it's part of the ISDN or Integrated Services Digital Network specifications. A regular channelized T-1 line and a T-1 PRI line are pretty much the same animal, with one important difference. PRI lines offer 23 rather than 24 phone lines and use the remaining channel to provide signaling and data. You need a PRI line if you want Caller ID for your phones.

Another variation is called T-1 Integrated service. Integrated means that the line carries both telephone calls and Internet data. That's right, you can split a T-1 line so that you can have a dozen outside phone lines plus broadband Internet service coming in on the same line. This is quite a cost saver for most small businesses that need both phone and reliable Internet service. Some of these Integrated services are called dynamic T-1 lines because they automatically assign all the bandwidth not needed for active phone calls to the Internet service.

What about VoIP phone systems? Most Enterprise VoIP phone systems use IP telephony within the company so that the phones can connect to the IP PBX system using standard Ethernet cabling. Many use the same LAN as the company's computers to save on wiring costs. All the in-house calls go from phone to phone over the network. But outside calls still have to connect or terminate to the PSTN or Public Switched Telephone Network. Most often that interface is within the IP PBX system or voice gateway. The most common phone line interface is the T-1 or T-1 PRI digital phone line, just like conventional PBX systems.

Another option that's not quite as widely deployed is to connect your phones to a VoIP service provider in IP format directly from your network. The service provider takes care of terminating calls to the PSTN. The network connection from your company to the service provider is called a SIP Trunk and is most often a type of T-1 line set up to be unchannelized to transport voice packets.

You should know that T-1 line prices are lower now than they've ever been. If you're still using analog phone lines connected to your PBX telephone system, it may well be worth your while to convert to one or more T-1 or T-1 PRI lines. If you already have T-1 service, then you should get a competitive quote to see how much you might save on your next contract. Simply enter a quick online quote request at T1 Rex.