Are you thinking of relocating your office? Or maybe you’ve already decided to make the move. Moving your office can be serious business, and moving your phone system as part of that relocation may be the riskiest part of making a move. After all, your customers expect you to be available no matter what, whether it’s to buy your product or contact your customer support. Not being available to your customers is bad for business.

A High-Level Phone Relocation Checklist

So where do you start? Ideally, you’d like to minimize disruption and eliminate downtime prior to, during and after your move. That requires planning ahead. Here’s a high-level list of what you need to do well before and on your moving day:

• Check with your service providers on if/how you’ll move your existing system.
• Research available phone options at your new location
• Understand your internet options
  • What type of access is available at your new building?
  • If your building isn’t already wired for the high-speed access you'll need to support your phone system, then you may need to plan for lengthy access installations for high-speed circuits that can take double the time
• Have a PBX? You’ll need to build in even more time to reprovision routes, port numbers, upgrade your software
• Backup all your critical data. It's not uncommon for premise equipment to get damaged in a move - leaving you without valuable information to run your business
• Move your PBX, phones and all the cords that come along with it!
• Pray that everything works when you turn your PBX back on...
• Make sure all your equipment will fit in your new space

And the list goes on, but you get the idea – there’s a lot involved and there's a lot of risk. If you’re just beginning to think about relocating, it may be a good time to consider an easier, less-risky alternative - it's called cloud communications. According to news shared at the UC Strategies' recent BC Summit, 90% of businesses are expected to move to their communication to the cloud in the next two years.

An Easier Alternative

Relocating is actually a great opportunity to move to the cloud. You can leave your old office on Friday, leave your old system behind in your old building, and move into your new digs on Monday with a new phone system ready and waiting for you. And the good news is, it could even be cheaper than moving the equipment you’ve already got. And that new phone system could have a lot more features that your old system doesn’t have. Sound good?

Not only can you be liberated from moving all that legacy communications clutter, you can be freed from the headaches that come along with it. Cloud communication can help you eliminate maintenance, consolidate your vendors and connect your offices, automate feature upgrades and scale faster. At the same time, your employees get seamless mobility, collaboration and integrations to maximize their productivity.

Since cloud communication is accessible from anywhere, anytime and from any device, your business stays up and running as normal even if you’re in the middle of a corporate relocation. You don’t have to risk alienating your customers by being unavailable, and you don’t have to worry about customers turning to your competitors because they weren’t able to reach you.

How Can a Cloud-Hosted Phone System Save You Money?

Some of your biggest expenses in relocating include your provider contracts and in-house wiring costs. If your business is like most enterprises, you have multiple provider agreements for local and long distance, internet, conferencing, PBX maintenance, disaster recovery… the list goes on. Early contract termination fees can run as high as $175 to $350 per phone, and you still may be responsible for the balance of your contract. Moving to a cloud-hosted system will let you consolidate all of that and break free of contracts altogether with month-to-month terms.

Then consider your cabling costs for the new office. You can expect to spend $125-$200 for each network cable drop. A cloud-hosted phone system can cut your cable requirements up to half because you no longer need the additional RJ11 connectors for the old phone system. RJ45 connectors are used in networking, where you can connect computers, phones, and other network elements all together. If your business still relies primarily on PRI trunks for voice services, cloud PBX will save you a lot of money by consolidating your network putting voice, data, and video together in a single network.

Consolidating vendors with an all-in-one cloud communications provider, can help you both simplify AND reduce costs. You can get high-quality voice, audio/video conferencing, email, voicemail, collaboration, instant messaging, and more, in a low, predictable monthly subscription (op-ex). That means you can say goodbye to long-term contracts that require high upfront costs (cap-ex). You can also save on cost of changes going forward, because cloud self-admin portals make it easy to move phone numbers, add or change users or without paying hefty maintenance costs or experiencing lengthy service delays. And since enterprises that invest in mobility solutions see a 150% return on their investment, on average, you’ll get a real return on your investment!

Why your Business Move can be a Blessing in Disguise

Moving gives you an opportunity to re-evaluate your office telephone system expenses and slim down your spending while gaining features. If you want to keep some of your legacy phones and applications, it’s not a problem. You won’t just have to replace the features you had in your new office; you can upgrade to new and better features, such as tighter integration with business applications and CRM tools and advanced reporting and analytics. Moving to the cloud before your relocation will enable your business to transition your communications seamlessly.

This article originally ran on Broadsoft.