Feature Spotlight:  Receptionist Switchboard

I have been listening recently to my sales team and my VARs selling the PanTerra Cloud PBX solution. I have heard a lot of industry jargon being used on the phone and felt that it would be helpful to our prospects and potential resellers if I was to explain, in layman’s terms, some of the features PanTerra has to offer.

One of the most common questions we receive in the sales department is, “How will my office manager be able to see what is happening across the office without Busy Lamp Field?” With a traditional POTS phone system and even some of the latest Unified Communication On-Premise phones, PBX’s were limited in their end user software. So to make up for that deficiency, they turned to the actual phone as a solution. Many of our current customers were concerned, before they moved forward with PanTerra, whether their actual physical phone ‘lit up’ like a Christmas tree when someone was unavailable. Cloud technology has come to the rescue and provided a better way to determine availability.

We can all agree that the point behind Busy Lamp Field or BLF is to quickly see who is available or unavailable. It’s just that a modern cloud PBX has a different way of solving that function. The best analogy that I can think of to illustrate my point is when Apple Inc. did not put an analog 3.5mm on the new iPhone 7. The 3.5mm jack is over 50 years old and doesn’t do more than carry an audio signal. What Apple should have called this change is “Progress,” writes Forbes contributor JV Chamary. So by turning to technology, Apple Inc. was able to provide better audio quality for its customers while creating much needed space for more important upgrades.

That is exactly what PanTerra Networks did when they moved the archaic red and green lights of BLF into the receptionist switchboard; which includes visual presence, IM and monitoring features. Progress may take a few minutes to adjust to, but once you get a handle on the new flow of information, you wonder how you ever lived without it. Think about when you get a new Smartphone with new gadgets and apps. How comfortable were you in minute 1 versus minute 10? Once your comfort level is adjusted, you wonder how you ever did anything differently.

Progress is the exact reason PanTerra Networks never charges for the Receptionist Switchboard. It is included in the Business Voice Seat and up. You receive the switchboard in any format regardless of which device you decide to use. That means if you walk away and want to control your calls from an iPad or tablet it is not a problem.

To illustrate the difference between what you get at PanTerra vs the competition, here’s a true story (the names have been omitted to protect the innocent). I will never forget at my last company, my director wanted me to walk up and down the aisles with an iPad and silent monitor my sales reps. Since they didn’t have PanTerra’s Whisper feature, they wanted us to literally ‘whisper’ into our agents’ ears (mind you we were selling a Cloud PBX solution). My manager went to Wal-Mart, purchased 3 iPads and set each sales supervisor up on their Supervisor Switchboard (for which we charged $69.95). It was a debacle, we couldn’t hear our reps and half the time it would make the IP phone silent monitor instead of the iPad, etc.  I only tell that story to illustrate the technological progress PanTerra is offering the Mid-Market/Enterprise space in comparison to one of the other top 5 Cloud PBX Providers.

We invite you to learn more about PanTerra Networks, and why we are backed by some of the largest VC companies in the Silicon Valley.