Depending on your familiarity with how the cloud works and what voice over internet protocol—more commonly shortened to VoIP—is, you may not have a great grasp of what exactly hosted VoIP does or how it can benefit you. Then again, you may be adept enough to not only know what hosted VoIP is, but how SIP phones can actually add value to a hosted VoIP setup. But let’s proceed under the former assumption.
Put in simplest terms, hosted VoIP or hosted PBX (News - Alert) is a VoIP service under which the hardware and PBX aspects are hosted at a location other than the site where the actual VoIP service is being used. VoIP, of course, is a bit less tricky to tackle, given the fact that even people’s grandparents are able to use Skype (News - Alert) and, to some degree, understand what it is. For the sake of thoroughness, however, is to use the Internet and cloud-based servers to place calls in lieu of traditional telephony methods and equipment.
Would you believe that you now know more about hosted VoIP than 72 percent of telecommunications customers? According to a blog post by Josh Rose over on SmartDataCollective, nearly three quarters of customers don’t quite get hosted VoIP and therefore aren’t aware of its specific benefits to businesses and call centers.
According to the blog post, hosted VoIP is extremely valuable not in terms of basic convenience and cost savings—which it does offer—but in the way it relates to big data. Collecting and storing big data can be expensive, especially for larger companies. In order to cut the costs associated with big data, many businesses are forced to cut costs any way they can. With hosted VoIP, it’s possible to collect all that data at a much cheaper cost than alternatives as the data is stored offsite and the cost of this storage can be bundled into your hosted VoIP plan.
In fact, features that were traditionally considered premium and therefore expensive tend to come standard with most hosted VoIP systems, features like call recording, voicemail, extensions, auto attendant, call redirecting and call queuing. That just about covers all relevant data pertaining to a business’ voice communications.
Aside from saving costs, hosted VoIP is also convenient. For example, voicemails are sent directly to employees’ inboxes as email attachments, making access possible from anywhere at any time.
In other words, now that you know what hosted VoIP is and how it can benefit you, there’s no reason not to make the switch—if you haven’t already.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson