The growing adoption of VoIP makes it easier for companies to employ more features in their phone systems. The increasing recognition of the need for efficiency with lower costs within an organization is an influence that's helping to drive the acceptance of VoIP in the business world, but there are lesser-known benefits to VoIP that are not often talked about that go far beyond saving pennies.
Let’s say you run a busy office that requires a lot of call routing. Legacy technologies gave us the switchboard for this, and an attendant to make sure the calls went to the right person. VoIP is your replacement for those bulky switchboards, thanks to automation. If you want to make sure Joe gets his calls while he’s on business in California, then you can easily configure that on the backend with a push of a button. Maybe you’re renovating office space in New York but you still need to take calls from your home office. You can quickly make sure that they’ll end up wherever you need, whether it’s your remote office, a mobile phone, or another satellite location.
One other less talked about feature is that VoIP allows for smaller businesses to remain competitive. How? If you’re still running a business with legacy technology, chances are you’re going to have a hard time competing with bigger counterparts. Backed by VoIP technology, any business can pick a plan that’s customizable, scalable and mobile—all with features that can better service your customer base. With VoIP, even small businesses can act like the bigger guys; users can rapidly tailor and swap in new local welcome messages or business highlights, making it an extension of your brand. This instantly improves your presence and image, and who doesn’t want to look good to potential customers?
Scalability, while more common, is not nearly emphasized enough to businesses looking to employ VoIP in a total system. Scalability is important because it doesn’t require a call into the service provider; this feature is completely do-it-yourself, and that’s a good thing. If you’re the type of business that needs constant scaling up and down, it would be an ill use of your time to work with the service provider every time you needed a change. VoIP interfaces allow you to log in and add and remove lines as you need it without losing time.
The more obvious benefits are still worth mentioning, like find me/follow me routing, voicemail to e-mail transcription, call screening, auto attendant, conferencing and click to call. All of these increase productivity while making communications overall more efficient.
VoIP can be deployed in such a way to improve your call sound quality, save you money and have rules in place to keep your company’s communication running smoothly.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson