PHONE SYSTEM BASICS 101

Look to your left.  Look to your right.  Two of three people in your office will have fallen asleep or gone home for the day by the time you finish reading this page.

The idea of a phone system is to allow many people to share a few phone lines, so that outside callers can be efficiently connected to who they need to speak with, and so that employees can efficiently make outgoing calls, and so that employees can efficiently communicate with each other.   It all comes down to efficient communications.

The basic phone system consists of four components.  The processor, the station interface(s), the line interface(s), and the telephones.  there are a couple of prerequisite infrastructure items – the phone lines and the station cables.  and then there are the myriad options – voice processing (which includes features like voicemail, automated attendant, and unified messaging), paging, music-on-hold or messaging-on-hold, headsets, and ACD.

PROCESSOR - This is the box that hangs on the wall in your phone room.  It may also be referred to as the “brains”, the “CPU”, or “the box that hangs on the wall in your phone room”.

STATION INTERFACES  - These may also be referred to as “station cards”, “phone cards”, or in rare instances the “World Champion St. Louis Cards”.  (Our preference is for American League baseball, and we root for the Angels, wherever they may be “of”.)

LINE INTERFACES – Also known as “line cards”. 

TELEPHONES – We’re sure you guessed this one.  Communications industry snobs may refer to telephones as “stations”, “instruments”, or ”handsets”.  We usually call them “phones” or when we’re feeling really pompous, we’ll call them “extensions”.  In any case, this is what you pick up to make and receive calls, and slam down when that call doesn’t go so well.  (They’ve got a two-year warranty by the way.)  With our systems, you can combine “digital”, “VoIP”, or “analog” phones on the same system.

PHONE LINES - These are provided by your carrier, and give us something to plug into the aforementioned line interfaces.  Also called “trunks”.  (And you thought that word just applied to trees, swim wear, and elephants.) Lines come in various formats and have confusing terms and acronyms associated with them, like “analog”, “loop-start”, “ground start” “digital”, “T1”, “PRI”, “DID”, etc.   On top of that, the various line formats may be bundled with data service and given different marketing names given by the carriers.  It’s good for you that we know what all of these things mean and can translate them into English and help you understand what’s optimal for your business.

STATION CABLES – This is the internal wiring.  Depending on where your office is, what kind of phones are presently in use or were last in use, existing station cabling may be usable.  We can usually pop open your ceiling and run a few tests to see if your existing cabling will work for a new phone system.  If not, we can run new cable for your phones, and while we’re at it, for your network.  Pulling two or more cables at one time will save you money.

VOICEMAIL – “This is Jimbo.  I’m away from my desk right now.  Please leave a message at the tone and I’ll call you back.”  That demonstrates just about everything you need to know about the basic function of voicemail: People call your extension, if you don’t answer, they leave you a private message, you retrieve that message and take action.  But wait – there’s more.  Lots more.  Voicemail can notify you via cell phone that a new message is waiting.  (You could add “I’ll be notified of your message and return your call promptly”.)  You can give callers the option of being transferred off site.  (You could add “Press 1 to be connected to my cell phone”.)  You can have an alternate greeting (or six) that changes based on the time-of-day or the day-of-the-week. (You could add “Today is Saturday, and that means I’m shuttling my kids between athletic events”.)  We could go on and on about the features associated with the basic voicemail, but the features get more and more trivial, and you’ll get sleepier and sleepier.

AUTOMATED ATTENDANT – “You’ve reached the Acme Walnut Company.  If you know the extension of the person you’d like to reach, you may dial it at any time…”   That’s automated attendant in a nutshell for you.  (Not to be confused with ACD –see below.)  Some companies want a live person to answer the phone during the work day no matter what; it is a simple matter of perception.  Other companies don’t have a receptionist, have a part-time receptionist, re-deploy their receptionist to do other things on occasion, or have a receptionist who they allow to eat or use the restroom once in a while.  This is where the automated attendant takes over, directing calls by department (“…for sales, press one…”), directing calls by name (“…dial the digits corresponding to the first few letters of the person’s first or last name…”), providing address and directions, etc.  Just like the individual voicemail boxes, the outgoing message played for callers by the automated attendant can be changed, depending on the time-of-day and day-of-week.

UNIFIED MESSAGING – This is a highfalutin term for what amounts to getting all of your correspondence in one place.  You can send voicemail-to-email, fax-to-email, and not surprisingly, you can still get your email through email.  Voicemail-to-email is nice for forwarding messages to people outside your phone system.  Fax-to-email is good for confidential faxes, and if you’re in the mortgage business, good for saving trees.  Kind of like the hall closet that holds all of your tennis rackets, bowling balls, and other stuff, Unified Messaging is good for organizing your customer correspondence in one place.

PAGING – “Roxanne, you’ve got a customer holding on line 1”.  The phone system can be used as a paging device, where a selected group of phones are used to employees who have an urgent call waiting and are not at their desks.  There are also built-in jacks to connect the system to amplifiers, which in turn can be connected to overhead paging speakers in a ware house or other large or noisy open area.

MUSIC-ON-HOLD – Just what it sounds like, callers can enjoy tunes like “The Waiting is the Hardest Part” by Tom Petty or “Hold the Line” by Toto while waiting for you to located their folder.  It also lets them know that they haven’t been disconnected – yet.  Our systems come with a standard RCA jack for plugging in any player.

MESSAGING-ON-HOLD -  It took evil marketing guys about two seconds to figure out that music-on-hold could alternatively be used to pelt waiting callers with subliminal suggestions to buy more stuff.  (Sometimes it’s an innocent “…we value you business, please continue to hold..”, but it can be so much more than that.  There are various players, and various services that we can hook you up with to accomplish your own marketing ends.

HEADSETS – Headsets allow you to multi-task.  Type while you talk.  Cordless headsets allow you to walk while you talk.  There are many kinds of headsets - corded and cordless – over the head, over-the ear, behind the neck – it just depends on what you want.  Either way, you’ll look like a wannabe fighter pilot is you forget to take it off when you leave the office.  “How many MiGs did you shoot down today, captain?”

ACD – Typically used in call centers, an Automatic Call Distribution system will route callers to the appropriate destination based on a logical analysis, and if needed can place callers in a queue until the next available agent qualified to take their call is available.  Suppose you’re a software company with products that work on multiple platforms, in multiple languages.  You don’t necessarily want the Vietnamese-speaking Widows tech speaking to the Spanish-speaking Mac customer – unless he’s bilingual and has been trained on both operating systems.  ACD can be used in conjunction with automated attendant and with messaging-on-hold systems to give customers a very professional perception of your business.  Adding on monitoring and reporting modules to an ACD can give you a clear picture of exactly what’s going on in your call center and what you can to optimize your call center resources.