Old-style switchboards a thing of the past as customers demand AI-driven digital communications systems

Remember PBX? If you do, you were probably involved in running a business in the dying days of the last century. Or perhaps you recall waiting patiently at a reception desk while staff frantically fielded calls on the cumbersome company switchboard.

Public Branch Exchange, to give its full name, was a phone network for a business’s internal and external communications. And it was usually a big investment. Today, most of those machines are in landfill.

The once-ubiquitous switchboard gradually disappeared as it went virtual and migrated to a computer screen. In the last decade, it completed its transformation when it became cloud PBX. Now it is evolving again, as it takes advantage of digital transformation and all the capabilities that come with it.

Rob Lith, chief commercial officer of leading South African communications solutions company Telviva, says it is not just about convenience, but has become crucial to competitiveness, “especially with being able to give customers the ability to communicate how they want — and demand — while enhancing team collaboration”.

It has for some time no longer been about routing calls, but about “unified communication” (UC). One could be forgiven for thinking smartphones would have made such solutions redundant but hand-held devices have severely limited capacity in this role.

[Unified communications as a service], by its very nature, is continually evolving with feature and functionality upgrades, and is not at risk of reaching end of life with minimal support 

—  Rob Lith, Telviva

“To date, we have not seen a comprehensive cellular service where the company has full sight of all the communication and interaction with customers, suppliers and stakeholders,” says Lith. “This is required, for example, when one has to comply with regulations in financial services or record calls where financial matters are concluded. Integrations with CRM [customer relations management] and business systems are key.”

Now UC is evolving further, into unified communications as a service, which has the ungainly acronym “UCaaS”.

“This has transformed business communications by offering a scalable and cost-effective alternative to traditional phone systems,” says Lith. “It ensures technology is up to date, because UCaaS, by its very nature, is continually evolving with feature and functionality upgrades, and is not at risk of reaching end of life with minimal support. In other words, by managing communications over the internet, there is no need to incur significant hardware, servicing and replacement costs.”

That does not, however, make UCaaS a no-brainer. Last week’s global computer outage that resulted from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike sending out a faulty automatic update showed that too much integration can be as bad as too little. UCaaS, in other words, can make a company vulnerable to a single point of failure. But Lith says Telviva is keenly aware of the danger.

“We design our product so that the core services — voice and interconnects — are as redundant as possible and set up for high availability within the data centres and cloud services we use across the country. 

“When it comes to the different unified communications services that are integrated with the central service, we design them as micro services, so that when one has an outage it does not affect others.

“It is therefore important for the customer to carefully consider the provider they are choosing, not just from a features and functionality [point of] view, but [in terms of] the provider’s business stability and its business continuity planning, security policy, how it is regulated and licensed, and its support capabilities.

“Then, of course, they need to have a product that is capable, scalable, robust and reliable, with the expected features that are intuitive to use.”

If a company still has a traditional PBX and it works for them, they are probably on borrowed time. As the machines become obsolete, vendors adopt an “end of life” strategy and no longer support them. The support for changes, repairs and moves becomes increasingly costly.

Before long, staff will begin expecting AI services with digital assistants, transcription capabilities, analysis, and the other advanced services now emerging. UCaaS is ready for this next phase of communications.

• Goldstuck is CEO of World Wide Worx and editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za. Follow him on social media on @art2gee