So far, I don’t like it. It was installed several months ago so we’ve certainly had time to get used to it.
Some of it might depend on the phones we selected. We are using the Aastra 480i phones.
The biggest problem is that you can’t tell who is on the phone very easily. We spent an additional $1000 so everyone could have HUD on their desktops. HUD seems to work ok if no one is calling when you need to see who is on the phone. If you have a call in parking for someone and then tell them to get it and they drag it to their extention right at the same time another person is calling, they grab the incoming call instead of the customer that is waiting for them.
It’s also a pain to have to do everything through your computer. I finally turned off the pop-up that shows the caller ID on the incoming calls.
This phone system started out frustrating because our sales person cut HUD and the professional version out of the bid at the last minute. We didn’t know what he was cutting out so didn’t know to order it anyway. During the setup, every time I needed to set something I was told we couldn’t because we didn’t have the Professional version. Finally spent the additional $1000 and got it working the way we wanted (mostly). We also didn’t have the echo cancellation card, because our sales rep never told us about it. That was another $800 we had to add to the system.
Another concern I have is that it is all PC based so if our phone server has a power supply go bad (which isn’t uncommon) our phone service will be down until we get it repaired.
Long story short…you can do much more for under the $12,000 we spent on this system and we are about to go live with a new system just 6 months after spending so much for this one. The one feature, I’ll miss?? Automatic call forwarding to Central Station at 5 PM.