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Telephone Systems and Voice Mail for Business in the UK

Business Voice Mail

Voice mail is just one of the features offered by a typical Voice Processing System. Many people unwittingly refer to Voice Mail but in fact mean to say Voice Processing.

The other common constituent part of a Voice Processing System is Automated Attendant. Higher end Voice Processing Systems can include features such as; Conversation Recording and Unified Messaging (for converting Voice Mail Messages into e-mail messages or vice-versa).

Voice Mail is the ability to have what is effectively a glorified answering machine facility for each member of your organisation. You do not have to have a physical telephone extension dedicated to you in order to achieve having a voice mailbox dedicated to you.

Many organisations allocate a voice mailbox to users who do not have a physical telephone extension. These may include; field based employees (such as salespeople or engineers), SOHO workers or teaching staff within the educational sector. Remote staff such as these access their voice mailbox from either their mobile or any fixed wire phone (such as their home phone) utilising DTMF tones to navigate around the mailbox once they have dialled in.

In most cases, you can create distribution lists so that you can send broadcast messages to groups of people. Messages can usually be forwarded (with additional annotations to explain) to other voicemail users on your system.

The size or power of a Voice Mail System is often stated in terms of ports. An entry-level system will usually have 2 ports and can handle 2 callers simultaneously. Callers can be either people leaving or collecting messages or inbound callers being stacked within the Automated Attendant facility. A 3rd caller to a 2 port system will either get busy tone or be queued in turn, depending on how the phone system is set up. Voice Processing can be bought in larger sizes where these usually increase in increments of 4 (i.e. 8 port, 12 port, 16 port, 20 port, etc).

There is no science to predict how many ports you should specify for your organisation's Voice Mail System, as there are varying degrees of use. If you front-end all of your organisations inbound calls with Automated Attendant then you will utilise more ports than if the Automated Attendant is only set to handle overflow calls not answered by humans within a given time.

A good guide is as follows: