What questions should I be asking my employees about their telecom needs?

Johnathan,

It depends on what you are looking to do - you can go from traditional dial tone all the way to Unified Messaging. What I'd do is have the vendor/s provide you with an ala carte list of what they provide and a LIST price of the offering based on 10 people. Then you should decide what your staff will have based on your budget. The problem is that as you give one person one capability and another person a different capability, you may lose some purchasing power, and with some of the current available services, it's all or none (all phones or no phones). Also, as you add services, you may be adding licensing costs that could break the bank - always ask for the cost and annual renewal fees; they are not normally brought up by the vendor in the up-front cost discussion - you gotta ask.

Most of the staff that I work with simply need a phone that they can transfer calls, put calls on hold, forward calls, listen to voice-mail, and do 3-way calling. I do see some staff members that would make great use of the capability of porting calls to their cell phone, and with logging onto any phone anywhere in the building, but not all staff will even remember how to do that.

I'd consider hosting - for a small company, you'll be better off having someone else managing the technology and not trying to find someone in-house to do it for you.

Jhnathan,

Both Kathy and Alan have great points that should be taken into consideration. One thing that I would add is to spend some time and visit another business that is in the area and see how they use their phone system. You can often times get real world answers and solutions that way.

We just recently went through a heavy upgrade of our phone system and a few of the items did not perform the same way the vendor stated or engineered them to perform.

So, if nothing else, please go through and have your potential vendors give you reference customers to see what their experience. Even customers with the best experience will be able to share with you some key points of what should have happened or 'if we had to do it all over again' type of scenarios that will help decide on a direction and requirements for the new system.

For a total of ten users I would stay away from the enterprise class phone systems. Just make sure to plan for wild success and have a system that can easily scale up to many more users. Often times in this case the managed solution will be you most flexible way of achieving this. But, make sure to keep them honest. Some of the managed solutions will have a break even point vs. hosting on your own. But, that is traditionaly when you are at hundreds or thousands of employees.

For some additional thoughts behind how to ask the questions.....

You are doing a very important thing and that is asking the people that will be using the phones day in and day out what they think. The more buy in you get from that group the smoother the end user acceptance will be, leading to a more successful transition.

If you can post back some details on what sector your business is in I would be happy to help taylor some questions to your specific areas. For example, call centers have much different requirements than sales offices do.

It's great that you're involving employees in the process, but now you have to follow through and listen to them as well as meet their expectations. This creates more work for yourself, but it will pay off if you handle it well.

I agree with Tony's comment about getting reference customers from vendors you're considering so you can learn first hand about comparable situations. In addition, you should get the vendors themselves to help you, by showing what the most popular features are with customers like you, as well as what they would recommend for core features. This will give you some guidance beyond what employees tell you.

Employee input can be great, esp if you ask the right questions. The challenge is that most people really don't know what they want, and likely aren't aware of the broader capabilities of VoIP or UC to give you anything useful. I like the earlier comment about asking what they don't like about their existing phone system. Beyond obvious everyday features, you might not get much useful input from employees for what they want. However, if you can uncover some pain points or frustrations, that will give you some valuable clues about what's needed.

The danger of relying too much on employee input is not being able to agree on core features. Then, if you go with that, and they're not happy, you're back to square one. In that regard, how you manage this process is just as important as the features you end up going with. Somebody has to own the process, and there needs to be one person for accountability - otherwise, employees could end up being mad at each other if one person's request gets used and someone else's doesn't.

Having said all that, perhaps the most important card to play is the flexibility of VoIP. No matter what you end up agreeing with, it's not carved in stone. Features can always be changed, usually with little or no cost. You're probably best off starting with a basic set of features that everyone will use, and then keep adding as they get comfortable with VoIP, UC, hosted, etc. Then everyone is learning together, and the path will be much easier to follow.

1. Doing user need assessment is critical in finding those "but we've always done it this way..." places where Unified Communications can make a difference. Asking users is only part of the puzzle. Users & upper mgmt often labor in the dark trenches of "this is how it is-land". Who might have different ideas?

- Ask your friendly competitors! See what your suppliers &customers use! "You just click my name and the system dials my #? My faxes show up in your email?"

- Ask potential vendors to make suggestions based on their experience in your industry. Give preferential attention to vendors who have in fact equipped other firms similar to yours. Ask for references as specific to your industry or work style as possible.

2. Beware of drinking the "VOIP KoolAid". So many vendors insist that you *must* use IP transport to gain Unified Communications features. 'Taint necessarily so!

Some well-respected, high-market share mfrs (Toshiba, NEC, Avaya, etc.) offer *mixed* architectures which allow gaining the low-hanging fruit of UC features without having to check/redo/reform every inch of your IP network to provide a Quality of Service & Power-Over-Ethernet ready environment. This often requires a quantitative (measurement-based) VOIP Network Assessment. (Better to find the lurking problems up front, instead of debugging the boss's gargling phone post-install!)

While we install lots of all-IP systems, we also *remove* or *rework* many each year done by those who skipped the pre-reqs and created a science-project instead of a production phone system.

The truth is:
- you can have UC features with or without IP endpoints.
- gradual migration to 100% VOIP over time, while harvesting the profitable low-hanging fruit (Unified Messaging, Computer Telephony Integration, Mobility, Presence, Browser-based system administration, etc.)is often the best business decision. It avoids the hidden costs of recabling daisy-chained "slapped it in 5 years ago" Ethernet, & changing out dumb switches (and yes, we still find hubs!) for QOS/POE enabled managed switches and routers.

While many authors here extol hosted for

Definitely some of the features which most of us would look for
* Outgoing calls facility to connect to external phones
* Voice mail box to attend to messages when not at desk
* Call diversion/forwarding facility
* Integration into OCS (if possible)
* Direct dial-in facility

But your decisions can be based on
* How many users actually need outgoing access (based on business needs - this definitely will help you decide the number of PRI lines for outgoing access)
* Whats the number of peak incoming calls during business hours (this will help you in identifying number of incoming lines)
* If its hosted VoIP solution, then you can leverage more on the Presence based services (with a PBX to support outgoing lines too)
* Are voice mail boxes needed for every user(most of the users dont attend to this - may be you can restrict this to Middle and upper line managers)
* DDI is definitely an attractive way to reduce cost of diversion from operator and to have better reachability from outside
* Integration to OCS helps in the presence status update, especially incase of attending to con calls

But all these depends on the nature of your business, your location of offices inside a geographic region, number of employees and the experience you are willing to provide :)

Personally, I would not do this with a questionnaire. And if I did, I would not question them about their telecom needs. However I don't know you or your business, perhaps you are taking the right approach for your situation.

What I would consider is how I want my company to function. How do I want my team to communicate? What functions do I have in my company, and do they all communicate with each other? In real-time or non real-time? Do I need to have audit trails of conversations, and if so in what parts of the company? How do I want my company to communicate with my customers. How do my customers want to communicate with me? All these questions are just as relevant for a small company as for a large one.

It's not about a phone system, it's about a flow of information, and about storage and retrieval of information.

Think about how you want to mix tools like wikis, documentation libraries, your company and customer directories, email, IM, and anything else that connects people and information. Your phone system needs to be a part of that if you truly want it to work for you.

Your team will hopefully have strong views on all of those things, and those views will be best accessed not through a questionnaire but through something more down to earth. Dare I suggest a trip to the pub?

www.mike-barnes.co.uk