When The Work Shop recently decided to relocate one of its offices, the company’s directors decided to upgrade its phone service to voice over IP (VoIP). VoIP Unlimited and Target (News - Alert) IT Services were selected to install the new system. The change is yet another example of a business switching from a traditional landline service to VoIP and part of a global trend to IP communications that seems irreversible.
Based in Ringwood, in England’s Hampshire County, The Work Shop is a recruiting firm that started operations in 2001. It places candidates in executive, secretarial, accounting, marketing, IT and call center positions.
Recruiting firms by their nature are phone-intensive operations. They frequently communicate with their customers to determine staffing needs and with potential candidates to fill open positions. Prospecting by phone for new business is another common, important task. A recruiting firm without reliable phone service would be as effective as an auto repair shop without wrenches.
Upgrading to VoIP service offers businesses significant cost savings. VoIP is more scalable, since adding more lines is easily done and can be done internally. Since VoIP by definition makes calls through the Internet and not POTS lines, long distance calls are no more expensive than local ones.
Visiongain predicted in September that global VoIP market revenues would reach $75.8 billion in 2013. Infonetics (News - Alert) Research predicts that revenue from business subscribers is going to continue growing through 2018 at a compound annual growth rate of seven percent.
Combine that with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission’s decision to allow American telecoms to test VoIP as a replacement for POTS, and it’s clear that VoIP is the way of the future and simply irreversible. Thanks to its scalability, smaller companies like The Work Shop can benefit from VoIP just as much as large enterprises can.
Edited by Blaise McNamee