Why Should Our Business Switch from Vertical Phones to TeleCloud?
If you're a client of ours still using a Vertical phone system, we wrote this article specifically for you. While switching to TeleCloud might not make sense for all our customers, the following five business drivers might just motivate you to upgrade and to switch.
Your company will experience better and faster service from us.
Vertical is feature rich and a good overall product, but due to its inherent design and server architecture, it requires more manual effort, maintenance, and time to get it up to date and functioning well. With TeleCloud, everything is managed through a web portal interface. When looking to make administrative changes, it's quicker and simpler to log in to this web interface than a Vertical on-premises server.
For this reason, it's simply easier and faster for us to resolve more technical problems. In general, it's easier to support TeleCloud than a Vertical Wave server, so you'll get faster support and service response times with TeleCloud. This means you’ll have a better experience with us, as well as a better overall phone solution.
Vertical on-premises equipment will eventually fail.
On-premises hardware is necessary, but it's also just a matter of time before it fails. When you switch to a hosted phone solution, you'll no longer need to worry about maintaining a physical server at your office. With the removal of the Vertical server, you’ll end up with less actual hardware in your space and, from an IT perspective, an overall less complex system architecture.
If we currently provide you with phone service, we also don't need to port your phone numbers, which helps you avoid another step. We only need to swap the Vertical phones with Polycom IP phones and then transfer over the existing programming, so the process is highly simplified.
(This Vertical server in your closet is no longer required.)
Switching to TeleCloud might immediately reduce your telecom costs.
When you tally up your maintenance fees, existing GreatAmerica Leasing Company costs, and TeleCloud phone lines, most companies find they can move forward with TeleCloud for the same or less money per month. We utilize monthly programs that include the phone hardware, phone lines, and our labor services to install the phone system, so most of the time, our clients can reduce how much they spend per month and get newer, supported systems.
TeleCloud is future proofed and designed for the long term.
Perhaps one of the most compelling reasons to switch is that TeleCloud is designed as a long-term strategy. Our team is fully focused on making TeleCloud and our clients' service experience better. As such, we focus our efforts on new capabilities for call center, mobile, and end-user portal software with TeleCloud. The entire industry has shifted to a cloud-based model, and traditional manufacturers realize they must become cloud providers as well in order to stay relevant in today's day and age.
According to Cisco, 50 percent of the phone PBX market is set to be on the cloud by 2020. In layman's terms, this means half of all businesses (big or small) will be utilizing VoIP/cloud-based phone solutions and replacing their on-premises phone equipment by 2020.
Manufacturers, such as Vertical, are simply no longer putting significant effort toward the Vertical Wave premised equipment, meaning the technology is becoming outdated and doesn't have a long-term road map for improvement. Vertical, like any company, has to adapt to current times and to focus on what's best for them, which means shifting to the cloud model.
It's easy to replace Vertical phones with TeleCloud.
If you're one of our current clients, it's a simple process for us to duplicate and to migrate the Vertical server to the new platform. The majority of the time, programming a phone system from scratch is a detailed process for a company, and it often necessitates three to ten hours of back-and-forth to sort out all the details. However, all this can be averted because we have all your current programming, such as auto attendant scripts, already available and ready for duplication. This helps makes the transition painless and easy.
Are There Reasons to Keep a Vertical Phone System?
In some specific cases, it does actually make sense for a company to keep its existing Vertical system:
- You're planning to sell your business and to move on.
If you're going to sell your business in the short term or foreseeable future, it simply might not be worth the effort of dealing with the necessary change management and new agreements associated with switching. If you know the switch would only be in effect for an incredibly short amount of time (twelve months or less), it might not be worth it to you or the provider facilitating the change. - You're stuck in a contract with another phone carrier or T1 provider.
If you're going to be hit with a large early termination fees for porting your phone numbers, the economics of porting to a cloud-based provider might not make sense for your company right now. If you have less than twelve months remaining on your agreement, we can determine what those early termination fees will be, and you can make an intelligent decision from there. - Your staff loves Vertical Viewpoint software.
Companies must assess whether the feature set available through cloud-based hosted phone systems will work for them. When switching, a new feature set (via the web portal) will replace the existing Vertical ViewPoint software, and you must make sure those new features are compatible with your business goals and needs and are acceptable to the team members who will be navigating them. While most companies find the new features more comprehensive and functional than ViewPoint, it's a decision your business and employees will have to make.
I'm Thinking about Switching to TeleCloud. What Are the Next Steps?
If you're considering switching from Vertical to Polycom IP phones, the first practical step is to have a conversation with your existing service provider. Then, the next steps are as follows:
- Have an on-site visit and site survey.
- Go through a remote webinar/demonstration of the new software.
- Review the numbers to see if a switch makes sense.
This demonstration will give you a much better idea of the full feature set available with hosted IP phones, and you can ask your existing provider any questions you have about whether this technology is a good fit for your company.
By Vincent Finaldi
Vice-President, Tele-Data Solutions
E-mail: vin@tele-datasolutions.com | Direct Line: (908) 378-1218
What brings me satisfaction is meeting with New Jersey–based businesses and genuinely helping them solve communication and business problems. As someone who has lived in New Jersey my entire life, I love working and playing here. I live in Florham Park with my wife, Lisa and our son Leo. Although it usually hurts, I will root for the New York Giants.
