Business Phone Systems with Call Center

Your company’s phone system is end-of-life, but it also has call center software that’s tied to it.

As you look into hosted PBX solutions, does your company need a system that includes a built-in call center component? And why do they keep calling it a contact center?

In this video, AeroCom President, Mike Smith gives you his opinion on whether you should buy a PBX that includes call center software, or purchase them as two separate items.

Want Mike’s recommendation on the best call center solutions for your company? Click below.

Ask Mike

About Mike
Mike Smith is the Founder and President of AeroCom and has been helping companies with telecom and cloud services since 1999. He has been the recipient of numerous business telecommunications industry awards and in 2011, he was honored as one of the top 40 business people in Orange County, CA., under 40 years old. Follow Mike on LinkedIn, Twitter or SpiceWorks.

Transcript:

Lately, I’ve been talking to a lot of businesses whose phone system is end of life and they also have a call center aspect of their company, so their call center solution and their phone system solution are both currently on prem and tied together and both are end of life and they’re looking for a new solution. And they’re looking at hosted PBXs, naturally because that’s where the whole market is going. And their question is should we tie those two things together?

Should we go with the same company for our hosted phone system and our cloud contact center solution? My answer to that is typically no. Those are two completely separate things and they don’t have to be tied together. A lot of companies who offer both, will obviously try to tie them together and try to give you reasons why you should use the same company for both, but overall I typically find that there aren’t that many good reasons to keep them with the same company.

The biggest reason why you want to keep them separate (in my mind), is because they’re two totally different things, you might install the services and realize you like one part of the service, you like the phone system part but not the contact center part or you like the contact center part of the solution that they have but not the phone system part… and you don’t want to have to get rid of both at the same time.

You want to be able to interchange both, independently. And with hosted phone systems and cloud contact center solutions, if you have two different companies you can interchange both independently and it doesn’t affect anything.

And one of the objections to that: I’ll hear my customers say (sometimes), is, “Well, sometimes our contact center agents have to transfer calls to our corporate employees. They need to contact the shipping department and ask them to reship something or they have to contact HR or sometimes a call comes in to the main office that really needs to be directed to the contact center and we need to transfer that call, so we need both systems to talk to each other.”

Well that sounds complicated, but it’s really very commonplace and it’s very easy to set up during programming when you’re programming your phone system and your contact center solution. Even if they’re different companies, it’s very easy to set up a quick call transfer between the two solutions and they don’t have to be with the same company.

And, on top of that, most hosted phone system companies that are also quoting you a contact center solution, typically the contact center solution isn’t even their’s! They’re white labeling someone else’s, so it’s two separate platforms, anyway.

So, for the most part, but not all the time, I do recommend keeping your cloud contact center solution separate from your hosted phone system for your corporate office.

If you have any questions on that or if you like some recommendations, give me a call (714-593-0011), or shoot me an email, I’m happy to help.