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.
