Avaya IP Office

1. Avaya IP Office is a full blown PBX system which can turn your office telephone system into a call center. It has all the features like IVR, voicemail, call hold, call forwarding, call waiting, call hunting, call transfer and call recording. Managers can even barge in calls to help out reps or for monitoring purposes. 2. The initial setup cost is high however the licenses which you purchase stay with you as long as you stay on that platform. 3. With Voicemail Pro, you can host your very own dial-in conference anytime you want for free. Callers can call a telephone number, enter a PIN and join themselves into your conference. 4. You can use the physical phone as well as the Softphone. Users can each other by simply dialing the extension and Softphone also support an internal messaging client. 5. You do not need to look for third-party vendors. IP Office supports CO trunks (POTS lines), ISDN/PRI, T1, SIP, etc. The main reason why we chose Avaya IP Office was that it supported Skype Connect. 6. Click to Call facility available with Microsoft Outlook and Salesforce Plug-ins. You do not have to manually dial a number in your email or CRM. 7. You can save the recorded calls or mail them directly using email clients like Outlook or Thunderbird.

1. You will have to employ someone who has a good networking and has experience with working on VOIP technology. Your average IT guy will not be able to manage this system. 2. You will be dealing with Avaya Channel Partners and getting support from real Avaya representative is not possible. The engineers these channel partners employ may not be knowledgeable to handle your requirements. We took 2 months to figure out how to get Skype Connect working with IP Office. I had to call Skype customer support and read the endless documentation on Google before finally an Avaya engineer remotely did all the configurations. 3. Its broadband based and you will need to allocate separate bandwidth for IP Office else poor call quality and drop in packets will be observed often. 4. Poor interface for monitoring calls and no reporting tool. I had to write my own SMDR service for logging call report to a CSV file and then use that CSV file for creating reports total calls, AHT etc.

Avaya IP Office is a powerful system which has so many features that it can overwhelm at times. If implemented properly and with proper training, it can transform the way you run your Sales or Customer Service operations. The initial investment is high but with all the features that you can use to run a call center of your own, Avaya IP Office will increase productivity and efficiency.