In a bad economy, businesses are feeling bogged down by the mounting pressure of fixed costs. Starting with gas, electricity and office space rents, everything has gone up over the past few years. And the latest price hike by British Telecom (BT (News - Alert)) has only added to the financial plights of U.K. business owners. In fact, BT customers have faced a staggering 40 percent raise in the basic rental prices over the last five years. Just the last week, the telecom giant announced another 3.5 percent hike on its standard line rental prices. But this is not the end: these changes could potentially increase again by a further 20 percent for some customers depending of the services they use.
Luckily there is a cost effective alternative for budget-wary U.K. businesses, and that alternative comes in the form of VoIP—a technology that delivers communications over the Internet and offers an array of benefits. VoIP does not only help cut back on communication costs, but also significantly improves call quality and offers many features that aren’t available on a traditional business landline.
With Skype becoming a household name, today people are more aware of the benefits of VoIP technology than ever. The providers of this Internet based phone service offer lower rates than traditional phone companies. On the flipside, many of them don’t offer the 999 service, phone directory listings or other common phone services. However, there are many companies that provide feature-packed VoIP solution for the businesses and features may range from a basic voice recording to keeping track of your employees and customers, real-time usage stats and more.
In view of growing popularity of VoIP, a number of providers have come up with innovative solutions. With lower cost, higher call quality and an array of features, these new age communication solutions are giving strong competition to the traditional telecos.
Buzzbox is one start-up business VoIP provider that claims its feature-packed VoIP services will help businesses save up to 30-40 percent against the current leading telcos.
“The telecoms market has already started to experience rapid growth in VoIP over the past year, particularly call centre adoption and companies that make high volumes of outbound calls have been the most obvious growth areas,” Buzzbox founder Stuart Spice noted in a statement. “But it is now becoming the mainstay of smaller companies who are looking to save money and increase productivity.”
Edited by Alisen Downey