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The New Desk Phone

Maybe my buddy Dave Michaels has touched on something in his post, "Time To Re-invent the Desk Phone." Just make sure you change the right things for the right reasons.

Dave knows that the good ole' desk phone lasts a long time. Dave says that, "Buttons are for suckers." He has a point when he writes that, "'I will try to transfer you, but I might lose you' is an expression frequently uttered by people quite capable in a broad array of other tasks. So common that our response is typically one of sympathy rather than outrage." Then Dave goes on to add that soft buttons with more intuitive design need to be included.

I readily admit to selling multi-button phones to plenty of suckers. Interconnects screwed up early on selling phones without enough buttons (real estate) and expected customers to learn and remember "feature codes." Other dealers of various wares have often undersold to customers just to win the deals, with the rationale that the fewer buttons a phone has, the lower the cost. Our phones have a two-button process to transfer a caller to either a voice mailbox of an individual, or to an individual's phone extension or cell phone. The process is simple: after answering the call and depressing the "voice mail transfer button" and then depressing the user's "extension button" aka DSS/BLF, just hang up. That takes all of what two, three seconds?

Still, Dave is right in another sense, because the bigger the sucker, the more buttons he wants. For large enterprise users with hundreds or thousands of desk phones on location, they get suckered. They buy phones with fewer buttons, since they may not want workers having more buttons than a Director or VP who may use his phone less in call handling than the troops. So the call handling thing goes out the door. Am I generalizing? Maybe. Call control has been hashed and rehashed, but what about call handling?

Buttons are tied directly to call handling, and depending upon the business and nature of the business that you’re in, it's imperative to have enough buttons, and this is unlikely to change without other changes in thinking. Maybe when UC and phones become just one license, then perhaps we'll see a greater decline in phones manufactured with multiple buttons. Meaning the vendors want to monetize on their investments and at the same time they want to keep selling phones and the old molds and maintain some sort of proprietary element. Okay fine, but bundle everything into one and my bet is Dave's argument about buttons then becomes true--fewer buttons means fancier phones. Instead of managing licenses for phones and UC clients, please Mr. Factory man give me just one license, make it affordable and fair and in the background you can figure out how eliminating physical buttons on the desk phone will save you pennies on the button.

We've deployed both phones with buttons and UC clients in busy call environments and the users love having both--using their UC client to do the same exact process I described above with two mouse clicks or a third click to hang up if they are using a Bluetooth or other type of telephone headset.

Still, that reason for telephone buttons stems from the very problem that Dave describes above that renders a phone difficult to use. Large enterprises and even SMBs that use the logic of denoting rank in the company in part by the number of buttons found on a phone are the ones that can't transfer calls. Executives and owners don't normally deal with call handling (I do) but these users demand to "just push a button." Why? They don't have time to go through the drill. With a UC client sitting on their desktop staring them in the face each day and loaded with the community of users in their realm, it just makes sense to do both. I have buttons and UC running on my virtual Microsoft drive residing on my Mac. I love it. Not only do I get call handling enhancements but I can elect to answer backline calls or not and my desk phone never rings; I get screen pops instead.

Dave wants capacitive touch screens and I think he's right. More adoption of the iPad means more employees using softphones on the iPad with their Bluetooth headsets. We both agree on the handset cord but I don't think Bluetooth is the answer. NEC has sported this feature some time and it hasn't taken off. Handset cords are easier to deal with than loss of synch with Bluetooth. As for easy-jack-access, this is another old issue that we are familiar with on installs. Dave has a point but will the factory guys listen to us bellyache about where they put jacks? They should, because a few weeks ago I struggled to plug in a handset cord to the dreaded handset lifter because the design of the jack on the lifter was ridiculously tight. Manufacturers are still sleeping today.

I think the best idea Dave mentioned is the EHS, Electronic Hook Switch, and I know exactly what he means about the "lifters" that use sticky tape to attach to the desk phone so when the headset user depresses answer or disconnect, what should happen with the lifters is usually more than amusing. Maybe I'll make my first podcast on "lifters."

Cell friendly alternatives are to purchase an iPhone or an iPad and your contacts and email will just synch. When hardware manufacturers realize the potential of the Cloud, maybe they'll align their solutions to sync cell phone and business contacts to the business desk phone. As for the shielding, he has a good point about the noise/interference--just listen to mainstream news reports with interviews and there's always someone with a cell phone on their person too close to the microphone on their lapel or hip. In the office environment it's usually the computer or other electronic device coming to close to the handset cord (inductance).

Two hold buttons are for people who aren't new, and how do you attend a Webex and multitask? (see Conducting Presence) But I'll add that maybe we just need to add a software fix--press the HOLD button once and you get whatever you get--standard music or message on hold or tones. Press the HOLD button twice and you get silence. Believe it or not, the old analog Vodavi systems had this similar feature, only it wasn't for silence--pressing HOLD twice got you exclusive hold so no one else could pick up that call. Can it be done? YES. Will the factory guys do it? Will users adopt it? Either way it's better than adding two hold buttons, especially when you want fewer buttons. Scrolling through a list of virtual buttons isn't ideal either, and whatever is done it must be people-proof.

On the Fingerprint scanner--yuck!

On More Radios--see my upcoming post on EMR/ELF debate.

On More IP--We can already do this stuff without the phone, although I admit having the IP camera call the phone using motion detection sounds appealing, especially when the squirrels and birds are setting off the motion sensors to dial the maintenance guy at home at 3 am on his nifty mid sized IP screen display phone that works with the network cameras I sold him. The cameras are equipped with motion sensors--no kidding. The IP elements for HVAC exist in VALCOM's solutions with paging that will integrate with telephony.

I like Dave's thinking because he's identified the Fort Knox of our industry. It's not the system and it's not the software--they’ve been attacked and jumbled around. No, it's the desk phone and that device is what more people see than anything else. Users and customers don't see anything else except for what's on their desk. For the benefit of those that think I don't like change (No !*^^%$ I don’t like UNNECESSARY change) you need to understand people. The "I can't transfer calls" thing is an old excuse just as is "the computers are down," and for those that can't do a simple telephone transfer or conference then you shouldn’t be reading this post. Sign up for training, get online, watch a YouTube video or call HR and let them know your CIO made a bad investment in those Cisco phones with no features. On the other hand, you may want to reconsider that, especially if you work for a bank.

Last night, I convinced my daughter to temporarily give up her iPod. Our audio box is where we store cables and gizmos for audio connections so I used a couple of mini-RCA jacks and did a little splicing and tapped into her iPod. I can play "music" through the telephone speaker but I have to "modify" the handset cord just like our customer radio station does for the DJs that answer calls on the air. Music transfers to our business desk phones from our iPods? Go ahead and laugh, someone read Dave's post and is probably already working on it and if the phone is web enabled, then maybe it should be able to sync iTunes. For those of you looking for an elegant solution check out iCast. Splicing is still required.

Panasonic offers very cool virtual button phones and you push a button to access the virtual buttons that are page 1, 2, or 3 memory of button translations in software for the same bloody physical button. Their coolest phone with fewer physical buttons and more virtual buttons is the KX-NT400 and it even has a USB port. Yet if you really want a true USB phone then you need to seek out my buddy Michael Lynes over at Eutectics because their stuff is pretty cool and one of their USB phones even has "buttons."

Handset lifters, lousy jack locations and simple software changes are ignored by our industry in general. Don’t mess with what works, as I've been told numerous times. Are buttons for suckers or do the suckers need more snookering solutions? While we both have different views and senses of humor I can't help but wonder with some creative juices flowing like Dave's suggestions, that we will see nifty new things for Old Reliable. I'm disappointed that all my phones don't have SIP/URL dialing. My address books have entries to support this and I'd hope that one day, they would become the LCR/ARS when making phone calls, giving the user control to dial free SIP URLs first and then dialing other choices, even Skype. Whatever changes we want, they will or should involve the elements of mobility, cloud and the ease to openly communicate with other "communication devices and services."