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Identifying your telephony requirements

By Mark McLean

Taking a strategic approach to your telephony needs involves talking about your requirements rather than specifying solutions. This article provides some useful guidance.

‘What are our telephone requirements? That’s easy. Five lines, five phones, a couple of mobiles and a three-year maintenance and insurance contract that covers the lot’.

It may be tempting to express what you need in terms of products or services or, to use the industry jargon, ‘solutions’. But it can be more useful for a supplier if you think about what you need to achieve now and in the future, rather than what equipment you think will achieve it. For example:

• Do you need to ensure that the majority of your service users can reach somebody at evenings and weekends? 
• Do you need to minimise the cost of your calls to mobiles or to international destinations?
• Do you need to be able to reduce the number of phone call expense claims that you have to process?

Your current business plan can help you establish your overall requirements, because it should describe which of those things you do at the moment are likely to continue, and which new activities are in the pipeline. Once these are clear, you can begin to assess the implications for telephony. So, given the scope of current and future activity, you should ask yourself:

• How are our people (staff, volunteers) distributed across different locations?
• How mobile do they need to be?
• What are the preferred methods of communication between our people?
• Who are our donors, funders, service users and partners? What are the method(s) that they prefer to use to communicate with us?

The nature of your stakeholders, and the context of the work that you do, can affect your telephony requirements. For example:

• If you work primarily with people who have voice or hearing impairments, then telephony may be less important and you will need to consider additional options.
• If you are delivering advice services to young men, telephony may not be as important in the communications mix as channels such as internet chat or text.
• If you work with users face-to-face but acknowledge some of this work could be done more cheaply and conveniently over the phone, then telephony may play an increasingly important role in your organisation.
• If your people spend a lot of time managing events or projects in a hectic environment, then mobile communication will be very important.

It is also useful to take into account any planned IT or ICT developments and check whether these have implications for telephony. For example:

• Are you likely to move premises within the next couple of years? If so, what ICT developments are already planned? If you intend to move to newly built premises, then a VoIP system may look attractive.
• Through what devices will your people send and receive emails or texts in the future? If there are plans to give each staff member a smartphone, then giving them a more basic mobile may be surplus to requirements.

You will notice that we are talking generally about telephony across your organisation, and this is the starting point for a strategic approach. Of course you must take into account the particular needs of specific projects or activities, and we recognise that direct funding for telephony may be easier to achieve. But when new projects are being established and the telephony (and other ICT) implications are not considered as part of a bigger picture, then you could end up with a plethora of expensive and overlapping products, services and suppliers.

Having looked at where the organisation is going, how that affects voice communication and what else is happening in terms of ICT, you should now be able to articulate some telephony requirements to your colleagues, trustees and potential suppliers.

For more information on meeting your telephony needs please read the Good Telephony Guide (8.2 MB PDF file. Requires Adobe Reader. If you don't already have this, download it from Adobe).