Traditional business phone systems, such as the on-premises PBX, existed largely in isolation from IT systems. But the worlds of telecom and IT have converged!
Business communications used to be about making and receiving phone calls, and were designed around closed networks and fixed physical locations.
But today's businesses are much more distributed, mobile and collaborative, and want to take advantage of digital tools such as email, messaging, video, content sharing and other rich media applications.
Cloud hosted VoIP phone systems offer converged voice and data, providing a vast array of business benefits typically at a much lower cost.
1. Supports Remote Working. This used to be a convenience, now it's a "must have." In the spring of 2020, almost all office employees were asked to work remotely as offices shut down across the country. Many analysts now estimate that at least 30% of the workforce will remain working from home after the pandemic subsides.
Those organizations without cloud hosted VoIP solutions found themselves struggling to keep voice communications flowing to home office.
Those with hosted VoIP solutions in place were able to easily connect remote employees, giving them access to the same communication and collaboration technology as they had before, from not only their desk phone, but their laptop, tablet or smartphone as well!
2. Reduces Time Spent on Voicemails. It's easy to miss important phone calls, and cycling through a bunch of voicemails to figure out which ones are actually relevant is time-consuming. Most VoIP services will convert your voicemails into emails - it's been proven we're far more likely to check email than voicemail. This also makes it simple to forward to other individuals when need be.
3. Enables Calls to be Efficiently Managed. VoIP services have a ton of automated features that previously only big companies with expensive PBX systems could afford. This includes automated attendants, call queues, hunt groups, virtual waiting rooms, computer integration, and more. The even bigger news is you get access to all these features without having to pay extra, and get instant updates and upgrades that are deployed automatically through the cloud.
4. Reduces the Management Burden. With hosted VoIP, there is no need for an in-house telephony expert to be on staff to manage the system. Never had an expert on staff? That probably meant it was the part-time headache of someone whose primary job was not telephony, which likely was draining their productivity.
5. Supports Business Cycles. When your business moves or grows, cloud hosted VoIP provides the flexibility and scalability to easily and cost-effectively scale up or down with your needs. You can quickly deploy new services for employees where ever they may be, much more efficiently than before. Conversely, why pay for services you're not using during seasonal or event-driven fluctuations in your business?
6. Maximum up-time and disaster recovery. This is arguably the most important benefit that greatly adds to your business continuity and therefore, productivity. Up-time is crucial and with remotely hosted data centers redundancy is guaranteed - unlike on-premise systems. What every type of disaster should occur, employees can plug in and work from anywhere, on their desk phones, PCs, tablets or smartphones.
At Ntiva, we recognize that the world of IT and telephony have converged, and that our clients are looking for a single source to turn to for all of their core business technology. That's why we offer multiple different types of hosted VoIP solutions from different vendors, including our own Ntiva Voice solution.
Contact us if you'd like to discuss how we can help your organization with business technology!