As for most part of the technology that seems to exit through the back door, the days of the telephone are almost gone. Of course, we still use them but not always. In cases of businesses – small, medium, or large – that have torn the walls down to open up their expanse and scope to spread all over the world, it just makes sense to cut costs on the gargantuan bills that will pile if a business were to use the good old telephone lines.
What helps then? What’s the new way? It’s VoIP and that’s an evidently convenient answer. So, why should businesses go the VoIP route and that too with the help of experienced VoIP consultants (Shameless plug: like us)? Here are some reasons why:
Avoid the cost pile up
While the economics of VoIP might not be as straightforward as businesses would like it to be, just as this post on Entrepreneur.com suggests [http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/218117], VoIP does help cut your costs drastically. Looking at how companies would have spent top dollar for telecommunications hardware (where a simple phone system would have cost upwards of $15,000 all the way up to a million dollars), a VoIP system could just cost you a monthly cost (fixed) of $750 per month if you went for a system such as Acuity’s Vocalocity PBX [http://www.acuitycs.com/2011/04/company-cuts-costs-with-voip/], for instance.
Of course, vendors [http://www.thenetworkpro.net/services-solutions/voip/] usually take up the trouble of rigging in the VoIP system for your business and even continue to provide recurring support if needed.
User Friendly to the Y
Whether you are a very small business using Mobile VoIP using tools such as Skype or a large enterprise using state-of-the-art VoIP systems on pumped up, futuristic networks, a VoIP system is never as complicated as even a standard company switchboard. It’s user-friendly, plug-and-play, and comes with high user adoption almost without any learning curve whatsoever.
It’s on a cloud that you can depend on
VoIP systems are usually hosted systems and vendors maintain them 24 X 7 – it’s a part of critical operations for the vendors and this is exactly what their business depends on. That liberates you from the headache of maintenance, saves costs on IT manpower needed for maintenance, and make sure that your telecommunication systems operate 24 X 7. Because it’s the cloud, your VoIP systems can be scaled up and down as much as your business demands.
There’s a thing called convenience
Ever so slowly, the charm of “on location” is wearing off for many businesses globally. The very thought of sticking to the desk to await phone calls to respond to customers, for instance, is plain old-fashioned and downright productive. With VoIP systems, everything is one the cloud. Phone calls can be made and received from anywhere and from any tethered laptop or mobile device such as smartphones and tablets. VoIP also allows for other services such as video conferencing, video communications, live collaboration, and much more.
It’s green – plain and simple
With VoIP in place, you’d obviate the need to use paper taking you into the direction of the much-touted “Paperless office”. You’d not need to travel and dump your carbon footprint only to feel guilty or to add to business expenditure. Vendors operate from a couple of datacenters to cater to multiple businesses, which saves the planet from way too many datacenters (if every business had to have a datacenter, imagine how it’d all nibble on the planets ecosystem).