Best Business Phones Colorado Springs | Business Phone System Installation Part I

Are you curious about installing Voice over IP phone systems?  Here at TSI Colorado have the Best Business Phones in Colorado Springs and we are experts phone systems that are going to give you insight into what the installation process looks like on your end.

Do you have a couple of options when it comes to the underlying Best Business Phones Colorado Springs technology for your phone system installation?  There are things out there that are free in the open-source world like CX3 or FreePBX.  There are also options out there for a proprietary type of hardware and/or software.  The proprietary solutions generally use an open-source solution under the hood – so effectively if you’re familiar with how these things work that will be a branch of the open-source technology and that branch or fork will then be adding some features to it and based on the license agreement they are allowed to resell it with their proprietary hardware. Perhaps the hardware is not even proprietary. It’s possible that the hardware is just leveraged – possibly resold with a markup.  Generally speaking – not always the case – the proprietary solution generally means that you have a proprietary solution that is based on open source that has similar features that you can get with your open source projects.  As mentioned the CX3 and FreePBX etc. etc. particular solutions have the same features as your proprietary solutions. So at the end of the day, you want to ask yourself what am I getting?  What is the value that I’m getting?  And what is the maintenance cost gonna look like longer term?

These are all initial topics to have with your provider prior to selecting what type of system you were going to put in place for the Best Business Phones Colorado Springs.  These things will matter because long-term costs, maintenance agreements, and what you can manage internally, etc. are going to be vital to your business and important for what you select.   You do want to make sure you’re picking the right feature set at the right price point.  I’m not saying that proprietary is not the way to go.  In some cases, it might be the right thing for you to do.  I’m just saying make sure you understand the cost and the benefit and make sure that that solution fits with your business needs.

The next step for the Best Business Phones Colorado Springs you want to consider in your phone system installation is what sort of cabling is going to be required at your facility or facilities. If you are doing a new build, this is the time to plan ahead, get somebody in there who understands installations, and cable running, and make sure that you have the appropriate cable.  At first, this seems like kind of a no-brainer and most people should be able to handle that.  You also want to make sure that you have enough cable to the right locations (i.e. drops).  I have an example of a large facility with a strange layout that I knew they were going to need to put some Wi-Fi repeaters on.  So they bought the Wi-Fi repeater and they had cable runs and everything was great.  Right up until the point that they went to plug in their Wi-Fi extenders and realized that they needed power for them.  They didn’t have power over ethernet (PoE) capability in their infrastructure (i.e. switch), so they ended up running extension cords to their Wi-Fi repeater.  I’m literally shaking my head right now.  You can’t make this stuff up.  So the bottom line is if you are in a new build-out, make sure you have somebody you can trust to design the network, design the cabling, and even pull the cabling.  Make sure that Best Business Phones Colorado Springs installation is going to fit your infrastructure, your building, and the number of employees you have.  Make sure you understand the number and location of drops you require.  This is very basic stuff, but if you have somebody who is inexperienced doing this it’s gonna cost you in the long run.  You want to make sure you’re getting the right answer, right now for the Best Business Phones Colorado Springs.

If you are retrofitting or coming back in with a new installation into your existing office for whatever reason – perhaps you’re upgrading your phone system, perhaps you’re moving from an on-premise to a hosted solution –  make sure you have a quality installer who will do minimal damage to your existing layout and build out.  TSI Colorado will get the right solutions in the right place for you.  You want to make sure that you’re running cable that’s required, that’s necessary that you want to make sure it’s needed, you don’t want the expense of running cable ethernet cable on long runs when it’s not required. Not only is this costly it’s unnecessary and provides zero value for you.  Make sure it’s necessary – we can’t repeat that enough.

If your cabling requirements are because you are expanding and growing into a new suite, adding more offices, cubicles, conference rooms, or whatever the case may be, you’re going to fit into one of the previous two categories.  Either you are going to be retrofitting what was already built out or you’re expanding into it, or you’re going to be building it out yourself.  All of the advice that I’ve listed previously applies, so make sure you have somebody who knows what they’re doing and is qualified and experienced.  You do not want to set yourself up for failure in the future costing you a ton of money.

Now that we have a basic understanding of what to watch out for, i.e. the so-called gotchas and the pitfalls of hiring a subpar subcontractor, you want to start thinking about what the process is going to look like.  In this overview, I am going to give you what we do at TSI Colorado.  This is what we do for our customers to give you the best possible phone system installation solution for the Best Business Phones in Colorado Springs.  We want to give you the best solution, the best value for your money. We want to make sure that whatever we’re doing fits what you need.  So our first step here at TSI and Colorado is to make sure we understand what you need but your business needs what your employees need to succeed.   If we can get that answer by talking to the business owner, fantastic, we will do that.  If we need to interview your employees and understand their feature requirements, and what they need to exceed, we can do that.  We are good at talking at the C-level or the individual employee level.   It is so important to listen to what the customer needs – look if we come along and install what we think you need and it’s not what you need in six months down the road you find out you can’t run your business … you’re not happy.  Nobody wants that.  You come back to us and leave us a bad review.  Now we’re not happy because we didn’t do our job, we failed you; we need to make sure we understand what you need and that we’re solving the specific problems that you have.  We aim to solve the right problem.  If you have specific desires or a set of specific features, or whatever the case may be going forward.  We want to make happy customers; we want you to be excited about your phone system installation and have us solve all problems for you which will allow you to run your business more efficiently and successfully.

This became a really long post, so we will pick up the remainder of this topic in Part 2 of this series of phone system installations.