Four Considerations for Selecting IP Phones

While different businesses strive to meet their unique goals, they share a common need: phones that really work for them. Whether your enterprise is large or small, a high-quality, reliable phone system is essential to success. IP phones come with a broad range of capabilities and styles to provide your employees the phones that meet their specific needs and fit their individual job requirements. With ShoreTel® ShorePhone® IP phones, you can easily fit the phone to the employee, so you aren’t forced to buy more (or less) phone than you need.

IP Phone Selection Criteria
When buying new IP phones for your business, there are four key areas that should first be taken into consideration.

• User Experience. Think about how much time your users spend on the phone. With an elegant, ergonomic design, ShoreTel IP phones feel nice in your hand and against your ear. Using the phone is intuitive and easy. With ShoreTel phones, users can see at a glance who is calling, get a quick read on missed calls or unheard voicemail messages, and get a clear indication whether a call is on hold or muted.
• Sound Quality. Not all vendors’ IP phones are known for outstanding sound quality. ShoreTel IP phones deliver crystal clear audio quality, so there’s no question that calls will come in loud and clear. Whether individuals are on a conference call, speaker phone, or talking one-on-one to an important client, ShoreTel phones deliver outstanding sound quality and good noise reduction capability. Wideband audio that delivers exceptional fidelity comes standard in all ShoreTel IP Phones.
• Different Needs. Different types of users require different phones, and there’s no need to provide users with features they don’t need or use. Conversely, some employees may be more productive with a phone that provides more features. For instance, a receptionist or executive assistant who juggles multiple demands is well-served with a phone that offers more call appearances and a color screen that clearly indicates a call’s status. On the other hand, a cozy retail boutique might be well served with phones with key system functionality.
  
  With ShoreTel Call Manager, employees have an unprecedented level of control over their telephone communications. ShoreWare® Mobile Call Manager provides mobile users with easy access to corporate systems. With software that runs on their mobile devices, users on the road still have instant, visual access to their corporate directory, voicemail and call history.
• Lower Cost of Ownership.The cost of any phone goes beyond the initial purchase price. Consider the cost of configuration and software updates. Besides the money saved by accurately matching your employees’ functions to the right phones, all ShorePhones support plug-and-play installation, which reduces deployment time and eases the administrator workload. ShoreWare® Director automatically discovers and adds new devices to the system when you connect new phones to the network, and automatically installs new phone firmware, further reducing administration costs.

A Broad Range of ShoreTel IP Phones
Selecting phones that are best suited to your enterprise’s needs allows your business run as smoothly as possible, with cost effective, clear and reliable lines of communication. ShoreTel’s ShorePhones give your business the capabilities it demands while keeping total cost of ownership down, and enabling you to reap maximum ROI.

ShoreTel offers three categories of IP phones: Essential, Professional, and Executive, so whatever your employees need, there’s a phone that matches their needs.

Learn more about ShoreTel phones.

Learn more about ShoreWare Mobile Call Manager.