As a business owner, I bet you get several calls a week from companies promising to upgrade your office technology with revolutionary new systems that will transform the way you work.

But when you take the plunge and install this technology, you find that these claims were overhyped, or certainly premature, as the technology fails to work as well as you were expecting, or deliver the benefits that justified the investment.

Phone systems are a classic example of this. With the advent of the Internet and mobile communications, many people have forecast the demise of the office phone as it becomes superseded by newer, more advanced technology.

Unified Communications (UC) has been cited as the next big for several years and even the BBC has written an excellent article to explain it on their website. But they are saying that UC might be the end of the line for the office phone and here at 08Direct, we think they are missing the point a little.

The point of any kind of technology is to make life easier for your staff and your customers. The concept of Unified Communications is absolutely spot on – we all choose to communicate in different ways and through different mediums and it is right that businesses should try to handle all of these methods as efficiently as possible and give the customer a great experience. But bringing things together doesn’t mean that the office phone is dead. In fact, the phone is more important than ever because we still need to speak to each other and are increasingly spread out in terms of our physical locations.

And for that reason, non geographic numbers are more important than ever because they give your business a national image, encourage your customers to call and have superb call handling capabilities. You can combine your 08 numbers with a unified communications system to deliver the ultimate customer experience. And they are easy to set-up, there’s no installation and even the most anti-tech business manager can manage them though 08Direct’s online portal at the click of a mouse.

UC isn’t the end of the line for the office phone. Far from it. It is just the start of a new era as the phone evolves to retain its position as the most effective communications tool at your disposal.