Personal Telephone System

The Morgans are a typical family with a not-so-typical phone system and home

computer—but it wasn't always that way. The Morgan home computer is their all-in-one communications appliance. The kids use the family computer for their school work and they particularly enjoy surfing the Web. Dad uses it to manage the household finances and to connect to his company's network for his electronic mail. During the day, though, it's down to business: Debbie Morgan has a home business and everything revolves around the computer. It wasn't long before she discovered that Debbie couldn't take telephony for granted. The telephone quickly became central to her business. She started out using her home telephone line, but it became awkward to keep track of which calls on the monthly bill were business calls and which were not. Privacy became an issue when business calls came during the evening. She would take the calls in her office, but occasionally the kids would pick up the phone in the kitchen and disrupt her call. Furthermore, with only a single line, she was missing calls from important clients when she was using the telephone line for sending faxes.

That's when Debbie invested a little effort in setting up a CT solution. In assessing her needs, she concluded that while the home definitely needed a second phone line so she could use one for faxes and another for voice calls, the cost of a third line could not be justified because there was virtually never a time when all three lines would be busy. She opted for a personal PBX (a personal telephone system the size of a computer hard drive) and a second phone line. She rewired the existing phones in the house so that both telephone lines came directly from the telephone company into the personal telephone system. She then connected her fax

modem, her office telephone, and the lines leading back to the kitchen and bedroom extension phones into the new telephone system. With this system she got the benefits of powerful CT features, along with the ability to share two lines among all of the users in the household.

Debbie's customers are located all over the country, but with her screen-based telephone

application, they're all just a mouse click away. When Debbie wants to follow up with a client, she just retrieves the right page in her client database and clicks on a dial button. Much more exciting than automatic dialing, however, is the support her new system has for presenting information about a caller when the phone rings—even before she answers. When a client calls, the appropriate page of her client database is displayed and she can decide whether she wants to talk to the person or have her computer take a message. If she answers the call, all the information she needs is already on the screen. In fact, the computer actually acts as a speaker phone, so her hands stay free during a call and she doesn't have to invest in another, separate piece of equipment.

The time and duration of every call is tracked, so it's a snap to sort out which calls are personal and which are business. Client billing is automatic because, with a little bit of scripting, Debbie was able to tie the call-logging application into her time and billing software!

The Morgan computer even acts as the household's full-time answering machine and fax

machine. It sorts out which calls are faxes and which are voice calls and presents both in an on- screen "mailbox." Callers on Debbie's business line are presented with an appropriate greeting; callers on the home line can choose the family member for whom they wish to leave a

message. Faxes sent to either line are detected automatically, so that no telephones ring and the fax goes directly to the computer.

To summarize, Debbie Morgan's home business in many ways is made possible by the combination of her personal computer and her personal telephone system. The combination delivers an easy-to-use set of capabilities that are seamlessly integrated, allowing Debbie to focus on working with her clients. Debbie saved a lot of money by using this type of CT solution rather than buying extra phone lines, a dedicated fax machine, a speaker phone, and separate answering machines. The system also saves Debbie a great deal of time in many areas. She is always working to a tight deadline, so knowing who is calling before answering the phone avoids having to spend valuable

time with a nonpaying client. In addition, the logging feature means saving the time that otherwise would be spent sorting through phone bills, and ensuring that every call is billed back to an appropriate client if possible.