As you may be aware, Openreach are now switching off on ISDN and PSTN telephone lines in 2027. We are reviewing businesses telephone and broadband setups, to ensure they are fully futureproof ahead of the planned network changes. The changes are to impact any of the following services using PSTN/ISDN lines, phone calls/systems, broadband, credit card machines, alarms/CCTV, faxes, and lifts. As part of our review, we would look at your resiliency strategy/broadband maintenance support, with services working over the internet. It is important that any failovers are in place/agreed, in the event of a fault or power outage.
**Next Steps**
In order for us to review your setup, we would just require a copy of your latest telephone and broadband invoices forwarding across. This would allow us to put forward our recommendations to ensure your telephone setup is future proof, ahead of Openreach’s deadline. We help our clients with site moves, new phone systems and new broadband installations. We have recently assisted a couple of our clients to use “Starlink”, due to poor broadband coverage in their area, and this has worked well to their requirements for both their phone systems and practice management systems. We also provide ongoing support in checking your invoices each month, and helping with any technical support issues.
Telephone Systems:
We are seeing more features being added to phone systems, and just wanted to keep you up to date on this. Should you be looking at a new phone system due to the above switch off, we can show you a demo of how the system/features would work. Equally, if you wanted to look at making improvements to your existing phone system, please let us know, and we will be happy to try and help you meet your requirements. Key features to note:
- PCI compliance built into the phone system to allow companies to take payments over the phone, and be fully compliant.
- Microsoft Teams and WhatsApp integration into the phone system.
- Practice management integration into the phone system. We would need to know the type of PMS system you use, to see if this is feasible to do with the phone system you have.
- AI (Artificial Intelligence) features, which is very new. We have been shown a demo for a new AI, where all calls are put into text once completed, and can be accessed by management/user afterwards, to read through what was said on the call (in a script format). AI will also advise you of the tone of the conversation whether they believe the call was negative or positive. AI will also summarise the call in text at the end with tips on what they believe to do next. We can see this being beneficial for training, dealing with complaints, and monitoring performance, for example.
- SMS messages built into the system where when on the phone, you can forward texts to advise the time of the appointment (for example).
- Soft phones – instead of having a physical handset, we are seeing more and more users have their PC/laptop as their “phone” to make calls through the speaker/a headset.
Some of the above features are only available with certain types of Cloud phone systems, so if any of the above is of interest, we would need to check if they are able to function with your existing system, and most likely require a more in depth conversation, before confirming if the feature can be delivered, on your existing phone system. Other services such as call stats, and call recordings are being setup to be more user friendly, in particular when using the system from a PC you can see “live” performance, and have easy access to this information.
Please do not hesitate to contact us on 01565 755600, should you have any queries or wish to discuss this further with one of the team.