Everybody knows that the internet is an increasingly important medium for business communication, yet what many people—business owners and operators included—have failed to appreciate is that the internet is increasingly eclipsing regular telephone services. This surprising new trend, which has really taken off since the year 2004 when the internet-telephony market really exploded, is referred to as VOIP, or Voice Over Internet Protocol (also referred to as IP telephony).
The phenomenal data speeds at which corporate internet connections are able to provide these days have only cemented the role of VOIP in business communications—the faster the internet connection and the more reliable it is, the better the IP telephony service will end up being. In the US, as in many places, businesses have special access to increased bandwidth allowances that serve as one of the primary incentives for getting a VOIP network installed at business headquarters. And despite the fact that the phone traffic does not get routed through the traditional phone network switches (something that telecoms carriers got all in a fit about; in fact, they tried to get VOIP banned by law in the late 1990s when such technologies were recently surfacing on the market), there are many features associated with traditional telephone service that can be had with a VOIP connection. In fact, thanks to the proliferation of so-called small technologies, many features that are available with ordinary phone service have been enhanced and improved for use with a VOIP network connection.
Ultimately, going down the business VOIP route means investing in business and employee efficiency, as the resulting set up allows workers to save precious time and perform tasks more quickly. In fact, many recent surveys conducted among businesses in the US and Europe have revealed that in excess of 70% of businesses find that their VOIP service is more convenient and productive for business than their traditional phone service. Particularly, with a VOIP network deployed in corporate offices, business users found that the advanced features were much more intelligently configured than was the case with their previous, regular phone service.
As mentioned, many of the traditional features of business telephone system have been maintained, expanded and improved with VOIP services. Let’s take a look at a few of these on an individual basis:
- Communications from office to office. When a business has further offices in addition to their headquarters, a pesky situation can arise as inter-office communications bills rack up with rates that are anything but preferential. With both offices having access to the same IP network, however, using the VOIP connection each office can call the other without having to pay the per-call rates that would otherwise apply using a regular phone service; if business is heating up and calls are being placed between the offices on a regular basis every day, then over the course of a month this can come to represent a substantial figure. Not only can VOIP save you that margin, but furthermore there are conference call features that can get both offices as well as another destination overseas talking in unison at incredibly discounted rates.
- Off-net calls. Any business will inevitably have valuable people (whether they be customers, collaborators, providers, what have you) that are not plugged in to the business IP network but that need to stay in touch with business headquarters and everybody on that network. With VOIP, business can keep these individuals or organizations plugged in thanks to a convenient local VOIP number that they ring up at a severely low rate and from which they can proceed to make however many toll-free calls they need. In fact, you can automatically program the VOIP network to schedule person-to-person calls for free, whether locally, long distance and even overseas.
- Communications security and control. To help boost the level of tracking and control within a business’s communications, VOIP allows business account owners to set up specific control mechanisms, such as lists of authorized users and special access numbers to be able to make calls.
Generally speaking, choosing to install a VOIP system at your business will accelerate the process of integration between phone and computer systems, thereby boosting employee productivity. As workers use their VOIP connections in tandem with their PCs, they will be able to retrieve pertinent data more quickly, provide callers with exactly what they need, and—in cases such as in-bound call centers—reduce the amount of time spent idling between calls.
Before deploying a VOIP system in their place of business, business owners should be aware of issues to keep in mind prior to and during the switch over process. For starters, you will want to be sure that the VOIP software you are considering implementing is reliable and tested, with a good report in general. Additionally, you will need to make sure that your bandwidth limitations won’t provide a problem, in terms of whether your other communications needs won’t prevent VOIP from being a viable solution for your enterprise. Furthermore, you will need to try stress-testing the VOIP network before full implementation: this is done to determine precisely what volume of VOIP calls will be able to be handled on your network at a given time, and will help establish a rational anticipated loss percentage for calls. In general, it is necessary to perform a wide gamut of VOIP tests to help ensure that a VOIP system deployment for your business won’t interrupt the operation of other office applications; when done properly, with sufficient testing, a VOIP system can be deployed with little to no prejudice to other systems and applications, fitting into the grand office scheme seamlessly.
So, if your business telecommunications scheme is still the same as it was over a decade ago, is it maybe not time that you considered converting to a VOIP system?
Guest Blogger Roger Collings runs his own business telecommunications consultancy from Leicestershire, England.
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