Bells and Whistles Can Be Tempting, But Buy Only What Your Company Needs.

Every interconnect company should be able to provide your business with the latest in advanced telephone features. But not every vendor will understand your company's needs. Some companies specialize in selling phone systems to companies with 20 or fewer phones; others target very large corporations. Some interconnect firms advertise that they are authorized distributors. Some advertise that they are one-stop providers, capable of installing phones and hooking up cables between all phones and computers.

If your initial dealings with an interconnect company result in a clear understanding of how it differs from its competitors, you'll likely get a good education about which telephone features are most applicable to your business.

If you haven't heard of "open architecture" yet, you soon will. This latest advancement in telephone technology is a way of integrating phones with computers. When a company opts for open architecture, it's asking for a special circuit board to be installed inside a personal computer to allow the computer to imitate a phone. It's an application meant for busy switchboards and customer-service departments where employees use computers and spend 60 percent or more of their time on the phone.

Open architecture is one up on play capability, which is the technology at use when your neighborhood pizza place knows all about your preference for pepperoni because its computers have read your phone number and looked up your previous orders. With this marriage of phone and computer, a restaurant worker can look at his or her computer screen to see where you live and what kind of pizza you ordered last time. Or your salespeople can pick up their phones and find a detailed record of a client's order history automatically called up on their computers.

Already phones can be programmed to search databases; open architecture furthers that technology and simultaneously opens up possibilities for shared faxes and e-mail.

Another recent advance in phone technology involves a long-distance feature known as T1 interface. Targeted to large companies that spend close to $5,000 each month on long-distance calls, T1 interface promises to save plenty of money for subscribers.

The interface allows a company up to 24 direct channels to a long distance carrier. Through those 24 channels, your company taps directly into long-distance lines and is no longer dependent on someone else's switching equipment. Hence, your company can avoid paying for the switching equipment.

Any interconnect company should be able to provide both T1 interface and open architecture services soon. Plenty of similarly impressive bells and whistles are already old hat for many office phone systems.

Consider one of the most popular features, call accounting, which tracks phone calls in every way imaginable. With call accounting, also known as station message detail recording, your company can track inbound and outbound calls by line, individual, length of call and destination of call. SMDR is an affordable feature that cuts phone abuse and helps determine traffic patterns. Monitoring capabilities are feasible for even small companies, so don't hesitate to ask about them.

Another popular feature is automatic call distribution, which even small companies use to distribute and track inbound calls. If clerk A is busy with one caller, ACD will route the next incoming call to clerk B or C. This feature also includes reports on how calls have been accepted.

Standard features in today's office phones include speaker phone, voice mail and LED display, which shows which number you've dialed, what time it is, what number your calls are being forwarded to, etc.

To determine which applications are best for your company, teach a vendor about your business.

Be sure to discuss modularity. Your phone system must be able to grow incrementally as your company grows. Make sure your phone system could someday "talk' to your computers and fax machines. If you understand exactly how you'll be able to add to your phone system (as opposed to watching it go obsolete), you'll avoid a stranded investment.

Another way to avoid problems with your expensive phone equipment is to buy a warranty or maintenance agreement. You can contract for 24-hours-a day, seven-days-a-week maintenance support or for minimal support, but be sure to protect your investment with some type of upkeep agreement. A maintenance agreement likely will cost between 8 percent and 10 percent of your investment. With phone systems running close to $500 per station, you could expect maintenance work to cost nearly $50 per station.

INSIDE TRACK...

* Take time to educate yourself about what's available from phone systems.

* Determine exactly what your company needs.

* Avoid unnecessary and unwanted bells and whistles.

* Make sure the system you choose can grow with your company.

* Find a good maintenance contract.