Hill & Co. Real Estate, a San Francisco brokerage, just completed a company-wide installment of a new state of the art Voice over IP (VoIP) phone system by ShoreTel (News - Alert), a manufacturer of VoIP and unified communications systems.

A brand new data network was put in place in all of its offices to facilitate this new technology. The system offers features such as intelligent call forwarding and voicemail-to-email conversion that allow agents to stay in touch with clients, whether they are in the office or out of the field.

“Our agents will tell you their phone may be their single most important business tool,” said Brian Wilcox, Hill & Co. director of technology. “They need to be in constant contact with clients, support staff, service providers and lenders. This new system ensures that they will enjoy seamless access to voice and online communication, regardless of their location.”

VoIP takes analog audio signals and turns them into digital data that can be transmitted over the Internet. The key advantage to use a VoIP phone service over a traditional phone system is that it’s less expensive. Other advantages include the convenience, portability and advanced communication features that are available at no extra charge.

ShoreTel offers IP phones to suit every type of business user, including executives, operators, remote workers, and call center supervisors. An integral and ergonomic part of ShoreTel’s VoIP telephony solution, ShoreTel phones come preconfigured, reducing dramatically the time required to deploy your VoIP business telephone system. It also offers more than 10 types of different IP phones.

Other IP phone providers such as Yealink (News - Alert) offer more IP products, such as IP video phones, IP phones, USB VoIP phones, and cloud-based services. Yealink was recently polled as the top terminal equipment provider. Its VP530 IP video phone helps businesses improve communication efficiency and productivity via an advanced user experience, as well as offers an easy-to-use enterprise phonebook solution on intuitive and icon-driven interfaces.