Planning for longer term home working?

Many of our customers and Oxfordshire businesses have been talking to us about plans to adopt a significant level of home working, even after Co-vid 19 restrictions have been lifted. Some are even making plans to close their physical offices completely and continue to work remotely.

This has led to reviews of their current business telephone systems, and whether they can support their remote working plans.

Our customers typically fall into 2 broad camps of telephone systems – traditional/on premise telephone systems and hosted/VOIP/IP telephone systems. Here are how the 2 systems differ and which is best suited to adapting to new ways of working:

Traditional Phone Systems

• Needs a physical base/location
• Single point of failure – if there’s a power cut for example the whole system is affected
• Whilst calls can be diverted, users are much more tied to the physical handset in their office
• Can be limited to a fixed number of users and adding or removing users is a longer process
• Limited features for remote working such as video calling, collaboration, and chat
• Calls can be expensive – particularly with workers in different locations

Unified/IP/VOIP Telephone Systems

• No physical office needed
• Lots of features included such as collaboration, chat, video calling, conference bridging etc
• Users can either pick up their office phones and plugin at home or work via an app on their mobile
• No downtime or point of failure
• Call costs typically included, no matter where your workforce is
• Easy to add/remove users – totally flexible

So you can see that hosted telephone systems or VOIP offer the ideal solution for both preparing for longer term home working or preparing for similar scenarios in the future. Many customers, new and old, are switching from their traditional phone systems to hosted or VOIP systems, at no great cost, and reaping the benefits for their teams.