While emails, texts, and video calls are now more popular than ever, it’s hard to find an office without telephones. In fact, most businesses prefer calls over emails for delivering messages that require quick feedback. Depending on their budget and needs, businesses tend to have different types of telecommunication systems. The modern business use VOIP phones. Traditional businesses are still stuck with landlines. VOIP provide communications over the Internet in a secure and cost-effective manner. Landlines work offline. Businesses that use VOIP communications are more efficient than regular businesses for a lot of reasons. Below we explore the benefits and explain whether it’s time you migrated into VOIP-based systems.
VoIP Systems Reduce Costs, Improve Time Management, and Increase Productivity
As part of the name suggests, a VoIP telephone system utilizes Internet Protocol to make calls. Instead of using telephone lines, all communication data is turned into packets and sent over the IP network. The IP network your business uses could be your Internet connection, a direct IP connection to your telephone service provider or a combination of both. The important part of the IP connection is that there is guaranteed quality of service (QoS) from your telephone service provider’s network to your office network. Note that if you are using the Internet to connect to your telephone service provider, QoS is not possible.
Placing calls over traditional phone lines means that a line is taken up by the two callers using it to communicate. Since there are only so many lines that can be installed, calls placed over landlines, especially if they are long-distance, are expensive. But using the Internet to relay call data circumvents this problem, making domestic and long distance calls cheaper overall.
In fact, businesses that use VoIP are often given the ability to make domestic and domestic long distance calls for free. If the phone number that is chosen for the business is in the United States, for example, providers often allow all calls within the "lower 48" in the United States for free.
If your business is on-the-go, VoIP services can be a tremendous benefit to you because they will follow you wherever you go.
On a traditional phone system, a line that runs to a home or business is assigned its own phone number. Any movement that takes place then becomes a trial of remembering the right codes or keys to dial on your phone. A lot of time can then be wasted by contacting phone companies to transfer services and phone numbers to new locations.
With a VoIP phone system, all of this is eliminated. There are no physical limitations. You have the freedom to move as your business demands without any added stress.
Using VoIP phone systems allows you to multi-task with the most tech-savvy devices, allowing you to be the most productive you can be.
Suppose you are on a call within a queue. While you are waiting, you can strategize your approach to client calls you have missed as you read voicemail-to-text transcriptions that are sent directly to your email inbox.
In another case, you can forward messages and voicemail easily. If you receive an important message in a voicemail, you can forward that voicemail to three other people at the click of a mouse.
These features and many more useful ones are available with VoIP phone systems. And because the service always goes with you, the features you find helpful can be added or subtracted with ease. In short, VoIP telephone systems grow with your business. Special Offer: Click Here To Download the Business Phone Service Buyer's Guide This guide explains how to find a provider to supply the features and service you need without overpaying. Click Here to Get Your Free Copy Now 4. Simple Conference Calls
4. Simple Conference Calls
The features just mentioned are not all that’s made easy by VoIP. Since all calls use a converged data network instead of dedicated phone lines, creating and participating in conference calls are made much easier.
It’s possible to take part in conference calls if your business uses a traditional phone system, but what you will find is that you will have to pay for an additional service to host multiple callers for a conference. These services are native to many VoIP phone systems. Instead of paying for something extra, you can take advantage of the ability to make conference calls as an added benefit to the service you already pay for.
Not only that, but VoIP services make video conferences much easier as well. Of course, these sorts of conferences are usually special cases, but face-to-face interaction with colleagues and clients, while business personnel are out of the office, is much more manageable with VoIP phone systems.
In today’s global economy, businesses can be located anywhere. This often means that meetings require travel. Even so, with a VoIP service there is no reason to lose the ability to conduct important calls or to fail to forward essential documents.
In the last few months, you may have noticed that major companies like Coca-Cola and JPMorgan Chase have eliminated voicemail. While this sort of move may not be appropriate for every business, some companies have apparently found that answering voicemails just takes up too much time.
With a VoIP phone system, you can choose where your calls ring and how. For instance, you might select the first few rings to be forwarded to your office. If you don’t answer the call, it will then be transmitted to a second or third device, say, a mobile phone or laptop. Quite simply, calls don’t need to be missed anymore if they are urgent.
Important documents that need to be forwarded no longer have to wait either. Using VoIP, business associates can e-fax their documents instead of waiting a day (or several) to get to a fax machine.
A common worry that surfaces about VoIP is the fact that if the internet stops working, so does the ability to make calls. This doesn’t have to occur under the right circumstances. The truth is that call-forwarding, like other features in VoIP phone systems, is incredibly flexible.
The capability to choose where your calls are forwarded, and how, means that you also don’t have to lose productivity because of local power outages or weather-related events. If the office phone can’t be answered, your mobile device or laptop can.
