My telephone agony

Solicitors are always going to need telephones. While the post seems to be increasingly a thing of the past, while we are all going to take a long, hard look at DX in the future as this may go the same way as the post, and while email is the preferred method of communication, telephone systems remain essential. Despite developments in email, texting, Facebook and Twitter, clients are still reassured to hear the sound of your voice.

I have always had a BT system. I used to know my local engineer who would pop into the office when we had the odd problem and with the aid of a screwdriver and pliers the difficulties would be swiftly resolved. Increasingly, however, engineers seem to have disappeared and about eight years ago we swapped our old telephone exchange for something called a digital exchange, which was not terribly nice to look at and consisted essentially of three bits of plastic on the wall.

All went well for a while but last year for two and a half days our phones were completely down. Fortunately our email was working but we could neither make calls nor receive them. Each time the telephone exchange told us that there was a digital fault. Contacting BT now is not terribly straightforward. Obviously you go through to a call centre somewhere in the world who puts you through to somebody else who says this is not their responsibility and suggests you call a third party who puts you in a queue whereupon you are told that your system may be up and running again 'within the next 48 hours'.

At that point, after your catatonic rage has subsided and you have explained that 48 hours without telephones is simply impossible and will lead to considerable financial losses, you get put through to a supervisor who tells you it may be possible to resolve the problem in a few hours.

All systems go

After my last episode of downtime I enquired as to whether we could have some kind of upgrade that might prevent this sort of problem in the future. 'No problem. We have just the system for you sir, it is called the Avaya IP Office System. It is such a good system and will resolve all your problems.'

I suggested having a meeting with the man from BT and the lady who does my accounts so that we could work out exactly what it would cost and how much disruption would be involved. The chap from BT indicated that it was incredibly straightforward and the old boxes would be whisked off the wall and the new boxes installed as if by magic and '“ this was the clincher '“ it would end up costing me less than the old system.

I asked whether I would need to get rid of the individual handsets that my fee earners had been using without problems. I was reassured that the new digital system could be used in conjunction with the handsets.

So, the order was placed and we sat back waiting for delivery of the new system. When the engineers turned up at about lunchtime on the Monday, I could see by their frowns and their struggling with their laptops that all was not well. The installation took until late on Friday to complete. During that week there were times when clients could not call in, times when solicitors could not call out, our voicemail went down and individual solicitors could not transfer calls. The office was in chaos.

The engineer told us that one of the reasons was that we should have bought new handsets along with the new central system.

Making it up as we go along

The problem is that there are no instruction manuals on telephone systems purchasing. We have to make it up as we go along. Nobody tells us how to do it and we have to rely as best we can on others to be upfront with the truth.

Putting in a new telephone system is a complex matter these days and what I had purchased seemed to be a competent system but it didn't work with our handsets. Eventually BT gave us handsets free of charge (after some fairly torrid correspondence), but the system shows no improvement and there are various things that the old system could do that the new one cannot.

I have spent hours of unbillable time on this project, fee earners have been stressed and clients have rung up asking what was wrong with our phone system. I get called at least once a week by a telephone provider asking me to move over to them. I have always stayed rigidly loyal to BT but after this difficult, expensive and frustrating experience, I have to question whether that will be the case in the future. It is also a salutary lesson in dealing with something when one does not have all the facts.

Small firms cannot afford an in-house IT department. While I have an out of house software provider they would probably not have known enough about the issues involved. The fact is a managing partner in a small firm of solicitors probably knows as much about his phone system as Cosmo the labrador, and that is frankly not a lot.

It is a pity that the system is not a little more transparent.