March 1

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10 compelling reasons to switch to a mobile PABX in 2023

By Bilal

March 1, 2022


10

COMPELLING REASONS YOU

SHOULD SWITCH TO A MOBILE PABX

Welcome to 2022 and the new normal of Mobile Switchboards and PABX

Hybrid workforces that are either full-time or part-time working from home are the new normal. This change in how people are working, first made possible by being online, then accelerated by the pandemic, has become entrenched, and makes many companies’ investment in traditional office switchboard systems obsolete as there is no person sitting at the desk of the telephone extension in the office that you’re trying to reach. They’re either working from home, on the road, or working from their phone.

International research suggests that as much as 33% of businesses don’t intend to have an office in the future and another 33% intend having only essential staff work from the office in the future. That leaves two-thirds of your workforce outside the reach of your traditional switchboard.

The impacts of this work-from-home shift have been many and vary from company to company, some managed to achieve improvements in efficiency and have used the opportunity to reduce costs whilst maintaining and even improving quality and service, whereas most continue to struggle with the impact of being disconnected as well as with the costs of keeping communications open with their distributed workforce and them in turn, with their customers.


What follows logically, as we begin to exit the worst of the pandemic, settling into a life where we must now learn to live with a virus as much as to avoid it, is that a portion of the global workforce will find their way back into offices, but those who can, may choose to work
from home as much as possible and for many, this will now mean full-time as their employers have already adapted to a new-normal, implementing systems and processes that are optimized for fully or partially distributed workforces operating full-time or some-time from
home. For some, the office no longer even exists as an option.


This leads us to ask, what challenges do companies need to overcome and what must they do to adapt to the new normal of hybrid workforces?


Well, choosing and adapting to new communication systems for one. With the introduction of lockdown, company communications shifted immediately to using online, internet-based communication systems including Zoom, Teams and WhatsApp as well as shifting from office switchboards to making calls to and from cellular phones.


VOIP or voice-over-IP protocol may have been positioned to be a clear and dominant winner from a global lockdown. Unfortunately (or fortunately perhaps) the reputational damage of years of expensive but poor quality and unreliable systems did not withstand the onslaught of online collaboration tools like Zoom, Teams & WhatsApp combined with mobile smart phones.


However, these choices also come with significant increases in cost as employers are forced to cover costs of being connected to the internet at home as well as paying premium rates for mobile calls, not only to and from their employees, but also for them to communicate in turn with their customers and suppliers, and coordinate with each other.

Coupled with this, many useful features of a modern switchboard
have been temporarily lost or abandoned in the online/mobile
business world including features such as call-transferring and
forwarding, on-hold, queuing, call recording etc. that are routinely
used by companies to maintain the quality of their services and
operations.


Today, new operational challenges extend to hardware and
include using employees’ personal mobile devices for business
calls, or not, and the challenges involved in ensuring that mobile
phones are always in good condition, fully operational and even
fully charged. Family members sharing mobile phones used for
business also raises serious security concerns.


Indeed, the blending of business and personal lives and data on
mobile phones reaches new heights in a WFH context.


So, what are the 10 most compelling reasons to switch to a mobile PABX in 2022?

CONNECT YOUR ENTIRE WORKFORCE AGAIN,
WHETHER THEY WORK IN THE OFFICE, ON THE ROAD
OR AT HOME.

All roads lead to home these days and employees are for the most part, loving it. Expect them to work from home as much as they can and adapt to the new way of work. Yes, Teams, Zoom and WhatsApp have catered more than adequately for the crisis, now it’s time to optimize for a new and long-term reality.

SAVE COSTS

Free internal calls, 50% cost reduction when calling your customers on mobile networks. Pay only for what you use with per second billing. Need we say more?

IMPROVE CUSTOMER SERVICE

Win back all the features of a traditional switchboard such as queueing calls, on-hold, forwarding, recording messaging, group calls, ghost, and supervised calls, and many more. Inconsistent internet quality, reliability and speed and the
associated frustration with VOIP means dropped connections, frustrated employees, and irritated customers. By contrast, 2G is the simplest, most
stable, and reliable communication protocol, optimized for voice communication, always-on, always-there.

SEPARATE BUSINESS FROM PERSONAL LIVES

Conducting business using a personal phone used for business or a business-phone blended with personal life gets messy, especially when the kids start sharing the phone at home! In the urgency of pandemics and lockdowns, it’s understandable and acceptable to make-do with this sub-par arrangement, but now that the panic is over, we need to separate the chaos from the organisation.

SEPARATE BUSINESS AND PERSONAL HARDWARE

Have you checked the state of repair of your employees’ phones? These devices, used 24/7 in every possible environment, dropped 3 times per day with cracked screens and worn-out batteries are what is running your business today. And, every time an employee’s phone breaks or doesn’t charge, that part of your business stops. That’s why we prefer rugged mobile hardware with dual sims,
one for personal and one for business!

IMPROVE TEAMWORK

Yes, making it easier and cheaper, even free, to call your colleagues means that they call each other more often, communicate and collaborate more.

EXTEND BUSINESS TOOLS INTO WORK FROM HOME ENVIRONMENTS

Some of your mission-critical business systems may not be easily available in the work from home context. Moving bite-sized mission-critical activities like quoting and invoicing for example, onto employee’s mobile phones as an extension of standard functionality may turbo-charge the efficiency and effectiveness of your work-from-phone workforce.

REDUCE LOGISTICS AND ADMINISTRATION

Centralized billing for all your employees’ mobile calls between themselves as well as between them and their customers, means only one system to manage and only one bill to pay. Ensuring that every team member has working, and reliable internet connection can be an administrative nightmare and huge expense. Go ahead, spare yourself the detail and the hassle!

IMPROVE HR WITH EMPLOYEE SELF SERVICE

Moving simple but critical employee functions onto their work phone, making it easier and faster to do them and leave more time to do what you’re paying them to do. Tasks like checking in and out, booking work appointments, completing timesheets or travel logs, applying for leave, expense claims and more…

WORK FROM HOME INSIGHTS AND BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

When your team works from a business phone that you provide, it generates pure data that can be used to measure and optimize the business. Without this data, you’re at least partly flying blind, or even worse, making assumptions based on loosely informed perception. Getting and using data that aligns efforts and focus with results will make the difference between poor and amazing results achieved by your work from home force.

FIND OUT MORE

If after reading this, you’re interested in finding out more about work from home switchboards, contact MobiNET at www.mobinet.app/#contact

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