The Definitive Guide to Upgrading Your Phone System

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1 The Definitive Guide to Upgrading Your Phone System Table of Contents My current phone system works fine!... 1 Expand Your Ideas of What Your Phone System Can Provide... 2 Do You Need a New Phone System?... 3 Clues that you need a new communications system... 4 How to protect up to 60 percent of your original investment... 5 Simplifying the migration... 5 How to make your new Avaya IP Office solution pay for itself... 6 Get Started Today... 7 Your telephone system may be working perfectly but is it really supporting your business to drive even greater success? If not, you may be paying a significant opportunity cost by holding on to it. Every technology has a useful life the time when it performs as it was intended to and adds value to your business. But what happens when a technology continues to operate after its useful life is over? That may be the case if you are using an older phone system. Many of these systems were purchased years ago in the pre-internet era, before mobile phones were in every worker s pocket. No doubt, those systems are reliable performers... but they simply were not designed to deliver the time-saving, customer-delighting, and cost-savings benefits today s communications systems readily provide to small businesses. Hanging on to these older systems may make it appear that you re enjoying short-term cost savings. But the fact is you re paying a significant opportunity cost: you are missing out on proven efficiencies, productivity and cost savings benefits that can far outweigh the value of keeping your older system. If that s the case in your business, this guide is for you. Use the information provided here to take a closer look at the opportunity cost you are paying by NOT upgrading. Also, learn how if you have an older Avaya system you can enjoy the benefits of the latest technology AND protect up to 60 percent of your original system investment savings that can actually cover the entire cost of an upgrade. That s huge and this guide will show you how to take advantage of this incredible opportunity. My current phone system works fine! As the owner or manager of a small business, you have your hands full. Why add upgrading your communications system to your to do list? The simple answer is, because it s worth it to you and your business. Small business communications have changed. They aren t just for making calls and taking messages. A solution such as Avaya IP Office one of the top-selling solutions in the world today is designed to seamlessly integrate into your business, delivering real quantifiable benefits: avaya.com 1

2 Avaya IP Office can help small businesses grow and become more successful: streamlining operations, cutting costs, simplifying hiring and real estate decisions, enhancing customer service and much more. Avaya IP Office saves money: in an independent evaluation, commissioned by Avaya, the Tolly Group 1 found Avaya IP Office nearly 25 percent less expensive to own and manage than its competition. Avaya IP Office delivers bottom line benefits: when Avaya IP Office helps lower overhead and increase sales, the benefits show up on your bottom line. Right now, you can upgrade and still protect your original investment: businesses with Avaya systems can take advantage of upgrade options that can provide up to 60 percent investment protection. In some cases, companies upgrading to Avaya IP Office have found that these savings pay for the system in just a few months. As part of this guide, we will show you an easy way to calculate these benefits for your business. Expand Your Ideas of What Your Phone System Can Provide You may not think of your office phone system as something that can help your business grow. But communications systems have changed, and now is the time to reap the benefits. Many of the capabilities in a solution like Avaya IP Office were once only available to much larger companies and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. For example, today, Avaya IP Office can provide video collaboration, sophisticated mobility capabilities, contact center solutions and more. With Avaya IP Office, these capabilities are available to much smaller companies. Instead of just helping to communicate, today s small business communications systems are designed to help enhance your business by helping to increase the productivity of your employees, lower your business costs, and delight your customers. They can make such a dramatic impact on sales or customer service, they literally pay for themselves. 1 Tolly Group: Tolly Test Report: Avaya IP Office, April 2013 avaya.com 2

3 Do You Need a New Phone System? What if your current phone system is working fine? Should you follow the old adage: If it ain t broke, don t fix it? When the risks and the opportunity costs outweigh the savings gained by holding on to your current solution, it s time to upgrade. Use the following checklist to see if that might be the case for you: Your current communications system is more than three years old You haven t updated your current system for several years and the software and/or hardware used on your current system is no longer supported Your business is experiencing growth and/or you ll be relocating in the near future and mobile communications are important to your business A significant portion of sales and service takes place through your phone system Your business relies on conference calls You need call recording for compliance purposes or to improve employee training You operate more than one location Of course, it s true that not every business needs to upgrade its phone system. While there s little doubt your business can benefit from the enhanced functionality available with a new phone system, the gains may not be enough to offset the savings of just holding on to what you have now. This may be the case if: You acquired your current solution less than three years ago Communications is not important to your business (i.e., you don t do any sales or customer service over the phone or via ) You don t do any advertising in which you promote a phone number or website You don t use a mobile phone You never do conference calls You only have one office avaya.com 3

4 Clues that you need a new communications system The decision to upgrade your phone system is rarely a simple a yes or no. Another way to decide is to look at some of the key capabilities you can get with a new Avaya IP Office solution. These can be so important to a growing business that even if you are missing just one, it s time to consider getting a new communications system: Keeping your mobile employees accessible: Today, many employees have to be able to work with a high level of efficiency and accessibility whether they re in the office or not. Most likely, your customers demand that level of service. Enabling employees to make and receive calls from their mobile device (be it a tablet or smartphone), instant message with colleagues, see their presence status (on the phone, busy, available), and even see where they are located (using geo-presence capabilities), helps make your mobile employees highly productive wherever they go. Enabling remote workers to stay productive: Sometimes employees just can t make it into the office due to severe weather, home or auto repairs, or even a sick child home from school. That needn t result in a lack of productivity. With Avaya IP Office, they can work from home and collaborate with colleagues and customers as if in the office. Calls get routed to their home phone, mobile device, or PC. They ll stay connected via IM and presence. With Avaya IP Office, it s easy to enable productive remote working. Collaborating face-to-face from anywhere: Just a few years ago, collaborating via video was something only large enterprises (with big budgets) could hope to do. Today, that s all changed. Avaya IP Office delivers affordable and easyto-use video collaboration that lets people use just about any device smartphones, tablets, PCs, room-based systems to meet. Anyone can join even those outside your firewall. And you can connect to a vendor s room system with ease. Just click a link in an and you re collaborating like you re in the same room together. Enhancing Your Customer Relationships: You may or may not have a formal contact center (where employees sit in cubicles responding to calls or s), but you most likely have people whose job it is to interact with your customers every day. Having contact center capabilities built into your phone system helps to improve the customer experience. For businesses with sophisticated needs, Avaya IP Office also offers multichannel contact center capabilities for up to 250 agents. No Cost Moves/Adds/Changes: Does it seem like even the smallest change to your current communications system requires a costly visit from a technician? If the answer is yes, it s definitely time to make a change. An Avaya IP Office solution lets you easily make moves, adds, and changes to your system without having to call a technician and incur costs. That means if you add an employee or change the way calls are routed in your business, you can make the change yourself. The savings are significant and the flexibility is a real advantage. avaya.com 4

5 How to protect up to 60 percent of your original investment Cost is often the biggest barrier keeping companies from upgrading their communications system. Fortunately, if like many businesses you currently have an older Avaya system such as Business Communications Manager (BCM), PARTNER ACS, Norstar, Communication Server 1000, Merlin, DEFINITY, Integral there s an easy way to reduce costs when you upgrade from your current system to a new Avaya IP Office solution: keep using some or all of your existing phone sets. When you look closely at the cost of an upgrade, you ll see that the phones themselves make up a huge part of the cost in many cases as high as 60 percent. But you can gain most of the advantages of a new solution without replacing your phones. When you upgrade to Avaya IP Office, you can often use your existing phones and replace them on an as-needed basis. Or, you can equip select employees with new phones executives, receptionists, sales and customer service reps, etc. who can really benefit from the added features. Either way, by being smart and managing the use of your existing phones you can protect up to 60 percent of your initial investment and still gain the benefits of a new solution. Simplifying the migration Avaya has also taken steps to simplify the upgrade to the new capabilities of Avaya IP Office: Wiring: Very often older systems use traditional phone system wiring. For some phone system providers, that s a costly issue you ll have to deal with (you ll need to run new wiring throughout your facility at a cost in order for their system to operate). For Avaya IP Office, it s not a problem at all: you can continue using your existing wiring with your Avaya IP Office solution. Or, if your facility has a Local Area Network (LAN) to connect your PCs, you can use that instead. Avaya IP Office works with either kind of wiring the choice is yours and the savings of using existing wiring can be significant. Common wiring interfaces available with Avaya IP Office reduce the re-wiring often associated with replacement of a phone system making the upgrade fast, easy and affordable. Training: If you currently have an older Avaya system listed above, user training is minimized as existing phones will start up with familiar default configurations, facilitating a smooth transition to the many new capabilities of Avaya IP Office while making it easy to access the proven, familiar features of your existing system. avaya.com 5

6 Future upgrades & leasing: As your business grows, Avaya IP Office easily grows with you. There won t be a need for another upgrade anytime soon. Avaya IP Office can handle hundreds of extensions, and increasing capacity or adding more sophisticated functionality is simple and cost-effective to do. If you don t want to keep using your existing phone sets, no problem. The Avaya Trade-in/Trade-up program 2 can often provide a cash rebate for your existing sets when you make the upgrade to new, modern phone sets. How to make your new Avaya IP Office solution pay for itself Simple techniques like keeping your existing phones (if you are moving from an older Avaya system) and using the wiring already in your business can dramatically reduce the cost of upgrading to a new Avaya IP Office solution. But that s just the start of how you can benefit financially. The real value of an Avaya IP Office solution is how it helps you build your business. Today, scores of companies around the world are relying on Avaya IP Office to improve communications, save money, and improve the way they do business. Here are just a few examples: An online retailer of custom clothing (printed designs on shirts, jackets, etc.) discovered that its old communications solution was not making it easy for customers to get to their preferred sales representative quickly enough. Intelligent call routing on an Avaya IP Office solution faster and more accurate helped generate a 15 percent increase in sales. A financial services company with offices in New York and San Francisco discovered that it was frustrating customers by doublescreening them (asking for basic identifying information over and over) and also losing deals if callers were not instantly connected to a sales representative. By using Avaya IP Office to set up a formal contact center and also have incoming calls ring simultaneously on a sales rep s mobile phone, it was able to save deals that were being lost. It cut costs so much by eliminating the need for separate fax lines and other services that its Avaya IP Office solution paid for itself within a year. 2 The Trade In/Trade Up program is available in the U.S. and Canada only. avaya.com 6

7 Want to quickly find out how much Avaya IP Office can save your business? Use this 5-minute Avaya IP Office Return on Investment (ROI) calculator. You ll see the value that Avaya IP Office can deliver to your business. An active veterinary clinic and dog grooming service is using its Avaya IP Office solution in a new mobile veterinary practice: making house calls using vans equipped with examination tables, medications and Avaya IP Office phones. In effect, the mobile clinics become another extension of the office phone system making it easy to communicate with doctors back at the clinic. In addition, the practice estimates that its Avaya IP Office solution made it unnecessary to hire five to eight additional people to handle an increased volume of business, translating into annual savings of over $200,000 a year. Get Started Today Look at what your business needs Avaya IP Office isn t just about streamlining communications it s about helping you address your biggest business challenges: Increasing sales Creating better customer experiences Lowering costs Think about your biggest business challenges. Look at how other companies are benefiting from Avaya IP Office. Your Avaya authorized partner will help you match your business challenges to specific Avaya IP Office capabilities. Look at the bottom line benefits See exactly what Avaya IP Office can do for your business. Take advantage of the Avaya IP Office ROI calculator. It takes just a few minutes and you can use the report to help guide your Avaya partner to the capabilities that will impact your business the most. Calculate the savings Remember, if you are an existing Avaya customer, you can most likely upgrade to Avaya IP Office and keep using all or some of your existing phone sets. Upgrading to Avaya IP Office also reduces installation complexity, simplifies programming and minimizes end user training. Start enjoying the advantages and cost savings of Avaya IP Office for far less than you imagined. Simplify the process and reduce the purchasing cycle Upgrading to Avaya IP Office simplifies the process and reduces the purchasing cycle often associated with the replacement of a communications system. Stick with proven and familiar technology from a leading provider of small business communications solutions available from your Avaya authorized partner. For more information, please visit the small business page on avaya.com. avaya.com 7

8 About Avaya Avaya is a global provider of business collaboration and communications solutions, providing unified communications, contact centers, networking and related services to companies of all sizes around the world. For more information please visit Avaya Inc. All Rights Reserved. All trademarks identified by,, or SM are registered marks, trademarks, and service marks, respectively, of Avaya Inc. 05/14 SME7547 avaya.com 8