For more than one hundred years phone service has provided an essential link between businesses and their customers. Consumers have relied on their phone to connect them to desired products and services and businesses have depended on the phone to ring for revenue growth. Phone service has long been the foundation of ongoing business relationships as well: providing customers with support throughout their lifecycle.

Many businesses have historically invested in traditional telephony technologies such as premises-based telephone systems, PRI or SIP connectivity, and over time have made the move to full IP based telephony or cloud-based phone systems. Both types of systems share in common the goal of improving communication with partners and customers, increasing collaboration with these groups, and in most cases, reducing the cost of technology for the organization.

Our interactions with customers using different types of phone system naturally gives rise to the question of why they prefer one phone technology to the other. Does it make sense that a considerable percentage of businesses decide to remain with their traditional circuits?

Many businesses and ordinary people now use internet phone systems. In-Stat, a Californian market research company, discovered in a survey that almost 80% of American businesses now use VoIP. It is likely that the situation in other developed countries reflects a similar pattern.

Over the past twenty years VoIP (Voice over Internet Profile) phone systems have already carved out a respectable chunk of the small business telecom market. You might know them as IP phone systems, cloud PBX or internet phone systems. Even the most casual observer of today’s telecom scene cannot fail to notice the growing number of small and medium size firms who leave their traditional landline phone systems for these online alternatives. What lies behind this strong trend?

Companies understand that today’s phone call is the equivalent of the well-presented shop window display in earlier years. The business phone system is the first “representative” of the firm that the potential customer encounters. Satisfied callers are much more likely to become customers, and existent customers keep their loyalty if their calls are handled well. Besides a top grade telecom system, effective call handling depends on quick problem resolution.

Today marks a milestone. It’s the beginning of a journey, one that we’ve prepared a year for. One year ago our CTO and I were working on a project that became the inspiration for our SaaS service – PhoneSentry.com

This project was to troubleshoot a complex VOIP network that we had designed and deployed for a large client. The CEO of the company was complaining of voice quality issues on their all-hands calls, and we were tasked with tracking down the issue.