Businesses of all shapes and sizes rely on the telephone to support their operations, which has historically required no small investment on their part. Today, however, there is a much more cost-effective option in Voice over Internet Protocol (also known as VoIP). Let’s consider a few reasons that businesses should see VoIP as the superior option.
Understanding Voice over Internet Protocol
At its essence, VoIP is very similar to the traditional phone system most of us are used to. The difference is that VoIP utilizes your broadband connection rather than the telephone one. This difference allows you to make better use of your investment into your Internet bandwidth while eliminating a pricy expense to a telephone provider.
Chances are, you already have some experience with VoIP. If you’ve ever called someone on a program like Skype, Facetime, or Facebook Messenger, you’ve used a VoIP connection before. These options can be great for a personal user but fall short for organizations in need of a solution. Fortunately, there are VoIP platforms designed for business use that offer a considerably longer list of options and advantages.
What Are the Business Advantages to Using VoIP?
A VoIP-based telephone system can provide your organization with undeniable benefits, such as:
Cost
While we’ve already touched on cost, VoIP delivers enough of an impact that it bears repeating. Consider the investment you would need to make into a POTS (or a plain old telephone system). Not only are there infrastructure costs to account for, but a POTS also doesn’t include many features that a VoIP platform does. Instead, you would need to also invest into the tools to integrate these features in. As a digital phone system, VoIP can incorporate the added functions that your business needs and—while incorporating these may add a little to the cost—it will still be less expensive than a comparable POTS.
Simplicity
All VoIP needs to work is a phone that can support it. There are no cables to be run—all it takes it for you to sign up and plug in the phone. All the additional services you need, like video conferencing and mobile-friendly VoIP softphones are similarly user-friendly.
You can also add new users through a simple control panel, or a provider like Data Net can handle it on your behalf.
Functionality
As we’ve mentioned a few times now, there are many other features that VoIP enables to help boost your business’ ability to communicate. Here’s a list of just some:
- Call forwarding
- Personalized extensions
- Call routing
- Call recording
- Automated receptionist
- Call queues
- Instant messaging
- Text messaging
- Find me, follow me
- Audio and video conferencing
- Integrated voicemail
- Line-of-business integration
Again, this is a short list. There are many more options available through a VoIP system in addition to these.
VoIP makes it far easier for your business to communicate effectively, helping to boost your sales and reinforce your internal collaborative processes. Interested in finding out more? Give Data Net and our IT professionals a call at (760) 466-1200.
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