The best features are only worthwhile if they meet some of your business requirements. Shiny bells and whistles that you may never use, or that fall very low on your list of priorities, should not occupy your attention, your mind or your budget.
Cross them off the list of things you want. It follows that you need to have already considered your requirements in some depth before you start investigating and shortlisting potential candidate systems. That is Golden Rule #1 – draw up your prioritised list of features.
Preparing Your List Of Required Features
You may want to refer to a few websites of phone system vendors to see what current features are being offered. And always remember that it’s the benefit of a feature that you should consider. Does that benefit appear high up enough on your list of wants? For example, a fax to email option may sound attractive but how many faxes has your company sent or received in the past 12 months? Is it a fairly critical and valuable benefit? Probably not in the majority of cases, especially for new and relatively new businesses.
Prioritising Your List
This second action is equally vital to ensure that the main focus of your searching is around those features that are really critical or very important. The old MoSCoW categorisation method is really useful in cases like this, where each item on your list is assigned to one, and only one, of these categories:
- Must Have
- Should Have
- Could Have
- Would like to Have
The Must Haves must all be present in your selected solution and most of the Should Haves also. The rest don’t really count except, perhaps, in the event of a tie. In that case, a system that offers a good number of the two lower categories should be selected, all things being equal.
Deciding On What Technology Or Mix Of Technologies To Opt For
The range of options can be very off-putting at first. A good way to take a shortcut through scanning too many websites is to seek the input of a professional at this stage. The purpose is to assess your written requirements and things like count of users, number of concurrent incoming and outgoing calls and so on. An expert may often consider requirements in a different way than you might and come up with a rationale for a mix of technologies and configurations that deliver better efficiency and at a better price than you might obtain by yourself.
Independent Service
We at GPS Telecoms Ltd are an independent provider. We can match the likes of BT in all functionality but at a much more competitive price. Take advantage of our free Telephony Review. It takes place over the phone and lasts for at most 45 minutes. That provides us with enough information to make a professional assessment of your current system.
Previous users of the service have been amazed and delighted at the savings and recommendation we were able to point out afterwards in our analysis. It costs nothing and can help transform your phone communications.
