VoIP Revisited: The Business Benefits

Many years have passed since voice over IP arrived on the scene. And many customers have benefitted from the cost savings and ease of integration VoIP enables. But, not everybody has gotten the message about what solutions based on this technology can do for them. So, let’s take another quick look at what VoIP brings to the table, and why it’s poised to see even greater adoption in the future.

VoIP got a foot in the door early on with its long-distance arbitrage. Vonage educated the market on this benefit of internet telephony, and then many other VoIP providers, and customers, hopped aboard.

Businesses also have a lot to gain by embracing VoIP. According to a Telzio blog, organizations see average savings of between 50 percent and 75 percent after switching to VoIP. That’s due to equipment savings, and international and long-distance savings. And moves, adds, and changes are easy and free with VoIP.

“Making calls over the Internet is dirt cheap!” notes Telzio. “Not only that, hosted phone systems eliminate the need for in-house servers along with their expensive equipment fees. A hosted phone system means that everything is handled off-premise “in the cloud”, so the expense of servers and maintenance is shared among the subscribers and everyone saves money.”

The related unified communications functionality that frequently comes along with business VoIP services can also sometimes have the added benefit of increasing knowledge worker productivity.

Reports indicate that organizations with UC clients save an average of 32 minutes per day per employee, and the UC can save companies with 100 employees up to 191 company wide hours a day.

That said, it would seem that companies and their employees would also see an increase in productivity when using business applications and systems into which VoIP functionality is integrated. And that’s happening at a growing rate as APIs and other software tools allow real-time communications like VoIP to be integrated into CRM, ERP, and other common business systems.

The rollout of 5G and the expansion of the Internet of things will only improve the potential for VoIP adoption, some reports suggest.

Indeed, just as businesses are embedding VoIP in popular business systems, some IoT solution providers and user organizations will build VoIP into their Internet of Things offering to support stuff like customer service.

And 5G could also help VoIP along because it will provide more bandwidth, which could potentially allow for better quality VoIP voice and video calls.

Of course, we don’t need to wait for 5G to enjoy mobile VoIP – it’s here today. According to Juniper Research there will be more than 1 billion mobile VoIP users by end of this year.

Edited by Mandi Nowitz