Traditional public branch exchange systems have been used by small insurance companies and other businesses for many years. Moving to PBX is not a decision that is normally made lightly, however, because installing one of those systems has meant purchasing a lot of very expensive equipment. In addition to replacing all of its current phones with models sold by the PBX supplier, the agency would also have to purchase and install specialized switching equipment, which it would have to house and maintain.
This traditional, equipment-based PBX system would work well as long as all employees worked within the four walls. It could not be extended beyond that point, however, making it less attractive for insurance agencies with home-based workers or remote offices.
That limitation has now been overcome with new technologies that allow users outside the main company office to be included on the phone system. In other words, a home-based agent in Seattle can be contacted using the same phone number as one would use to call the main insurance office in Boston. The remote worker would have an extension on the system and all the features, just as though he or she was in the main office.
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This capability is often referred to as a virtual PBX. Yet as mentioned earlier, a search on that term will produce results not only for true virtual PBX systems, but for hosted PBX systems as well.
A virtual PBX is a service that lays on top of your current telephone service. It primarily manages inbound calls, routing them to the phones you already own. (Outbound calls are handled the way they've always been handled, so the virtual PBX system doesn't need to get involved.)
In addition to the auto-attendant, voice mail, multiple extensions, internal call forwarding and other typical PBX benefits, virtual PBX also provides find me/follow me capability that allows calls that come into the office to be automatically forwarded to any phone anywhere, including the user's home or mobile phone. Phones can be set to ring all at once or in sequence using a simple online scheduler.
The functionality of a virtual PBX is completely software-based, which means you don't have to purchase any additional equipment, either on the user end or for the back office. Everything is controlled via the online user interface. As a result, the system is completely agnostic to the location of the phones, which is what allows users around the country or around the world to be united under a single local or toll-free telephone number.
A hosted PBX service, on the other hand, uses Voice-over IP (VoIP) to both make and receive calls via your Internet connection. While it offers similar functionality, there are some serious concerns. The biggest is probably whether the entire system is reliable enough.
If you've read anything about VoIP, you know that even big corporations with large IT staffs are still a bit leery of it. For one thing, they have concerns whether their IT infrastructure, which is set up to handle less bandwidth-intensive data traffic, is up to the big demands that voice traffic will place on it. More importantly, they're not sure they want to put all their communications eggs in one basket. Especially when the Internet still isn't as reliable as plain old-fashioned telephone service.
What that means to a small insurance company is if your Internet provider has a problem, you not only lose e-mail communications, you also lose your phone system. If it goes on for any length of time (such as a few hours, which is not uncommon), you're out of touch with customers and prospects until the Internet comes back online. Imagine what that would do to your business.
Since a virtual PBX uses regular phone lines, an Internet outage, while certainly inconvenient, still doesn't bring everything to a grinding halt. Your clients, prospects and business partners will be able to reach you over the phone, just as they always have. It's a nice little failsafe system to have in place.
The other point of note is that hosted systems usually require you to purchase some sort of equipment – usually a special phone and some switching devices, as well as some software that has to be installed on individual PCs. That may come as quite a shock to a business on a strict budget. Again, a virtual PBX service works with any phones anywhere, with no additional equipment purchases required.
While it may be true that a rose is a rose is rose, there are significant differences between virtual and hosted PBX systems. Not knowing what those differences are can send you down the garden path.
Be sure you know what you're getting when you look at the search results for "virtual PBX." Otherwise you may wind up getting more – and less – than you need.
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