Finance Q&A

Opinion on NEC Phone Systems ?

Q. I just got a quote back from a vendor , with really good pricing a new NEC phone system. I have two options which is keep our Norstar system and just upgrade or get a new NEC phone system for the same price. The main difference on the features is that the NEC will support *whisper page* out of the box. What's your opinion on the NEC PBX systems? This is for their IPK handset. My current system is a Norstar System.

A. What is whisper page exactly? Is it the same as voicecall on the Norstar? The NEC phone sets (at least the DTERM 3's) really didn't hold up well. You can't beat the Norstar for reliability. I can't believe that the NEC plus all new phone sets beat the Norstar upgrade, which of course allows you to keep all of your existing phone sets. Nortel is a lot easier to get parts for, and you can get refurb pretty cheap, but I've enjoyed the NEC Elite and even have an NEC PBX, and like the general phone layout better. There is not much difference, but a few features I appreciated of the NEC are: - intelligent 911 line seizing (drops a voice line to make room when 911 is dialled). - the voicecall feature (using the external speaker of a phone set by taking a phone "off hook" remotely) can be used to dial into the computer room to listen for alarms. - you can easily label NEC phones with one print job, without having to tear and stick every Norstar button. - you do not need to upgrade software as often as Nortel systems. The major problem I do have using NEC PBX is having to untrain die-hard Meridian users (especially when people have used it for voicemail), as the option keys are quite different! Also NEC is not compatible with all third party call centre CTI applications, and there is not much "basic level" ACD capabilities. We've had an NEC PBX (2000 IVS and later a 2000 IVS2) since about '97. Whisper page has been a tremendous pain in the butt for us. We had serious problems when initially implementing it and then during an 'upgrade' where we moved to a Unity VM system the problems became considerably uglier. All subsequent information is based on what I'm told by my VAR so please take it with a grain or two of salt but I believe it to be correct. The whisper page feature requires that the calling phone hit a busy signal in order to activate the feature. This means that normal internal call forward to voice mail on a busy signal doesn't work. It also means that in order to have an unsupervised transfer from the voice mail to extensions on an incoming call we needed to set up 'split' call forwarding. This means that we have a completely different set of forwarding info for each extension depending on whether the call is coming from an external trunk or an internal extension. This is both a pain to maintain and makes it a major pain when an agent wants to forward all calls directly to voice mail. We also had a problem with whisper page volume. For a while the calling party who should not have been able to hear the whisper page could in fact hear it at a very low volume. It was disconcerting at the best and depending on what was said downright dangerous. This was fixed ultimately but required a tech to call NEC about five times and took the better part of a couple of months to resolve. Anyway, my opinion is that whisper page isn't worth a darn unless it has been heavily massaged in newer software releases or our VAR has no clue and isn't setting it up properly for us. I dunno about him ... but where I work, we're looking at uprating from a Nortel Meridian Option 21 (which is being phased out). The new NEC Aspire is one of the systems we're looking at, along with the Option 11. We've also looked at a 3Com system, but are wary of a pure IP phone system. We're also taking a bid for a Lucent/Avaya/Whoever owns that now anyway system. One thing we like about both the Aspire and the Option 21 is the ability to do a blend of IP and traditonal telephony. We do have a decent number of "remote" employees.

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