If a desktop phone rings in an empty office, does it even make a sound?
The answer is of course, yes. However, these phones have spent the better part of 15 months ringing into the ether and many organisations are now reviewing the need for these devices as their employees transition to a hybrid working model.
To accommodate this upheaval, many companies used whatever they could – including devices such as mobile phones – to ensure their staff could communicate and collaborate effectively.
Of the 476 firms that analyst Metirgy surveyed for its Workplace Collaboration: 2021-2022 report, over 47 percent reported a decline in phone system utilisation in 2020, with 17 percent of those shifting to mobile phones, and 26.7 percent moving to meetings apps.
This method provided an effective sticking plaster to the solution but companies now need to consider a more long-term solution to enable hybrid working, according to Iain Smith, Director of Professional Services at CPS.
“Tonnes of organisations have kept their PBX and either provided a mobile phone or some sort of soft client to try and make the PBX work,” Smith explained to UC Today.
“There is now opportunity with going back into the office, that they can transition and have interoperability with Teams, so that if we all have to go back into lockdown again, then they don’t have to rely on their PBX anymore”
Desktop phone systems are surviving through 2021, with 25.8 percent of firms increasing their desktop phone deployments and just six percent planning to remove them altogether by the end of this year.
The popularity of Microsoft Teams during the pandemic was partly due to its integration with the ubiquitous Office 365. Metrigy’s research backed this boom up, revealing that 70 percent of Teams adopters opt for Direct Routing as their phone solution.
However, organisations shouldn’t neglect this progress enabled by Teams in favour of returning to the old office PBX system, Smith warned.
“Companies need to look at this next phase with the return to the office; they need to give staff either a Teams phone or remove old video conferencing suites out of their meeting rooms, instead continuing to build on the Microsoft technology and ecosystem around Teams Rooms systems,” Smith advised.
Companies that must still use their PBX systems should not have two siloed environments – one for PBX and one for Teams – and use a managed service provider to allow interoperability, enabling a call coming through to ring through both the deskphone and Teams, advised Smith.
Nearly two-thirds of organisations will provision desktop phones for Teams by the end of this year, according to Metrigy’s report. Smith advised that organisations should consider utilising devices that are easy to configure, provide high quality audio and video experiences, and meeting room experiences, such as collaboration bars, Teams Rooms systems, DECT devices and handsets and meeting room panels.
“Some benefits of using Teams certified devices are the one-click join and the capability of entering a meeting room that uses near frequency radio waves to recognise that you have Teams on your laptop and asks if you would like to join your laptop to the Teams Rooms system,” he elaborated.
“You can do lots of other things with Teams that you couldn’t do in the old world; using the wrong devices just creates a challenge for an organisation’s IT department and they’re not reaping the full benefits of what Teams can offer”
