What is hosted VOIP? It’s a cloud-based phone solution that streamlines the systems once dominated by landline phone networks. When you implement hosted VOIP for your business, you allow your business to reap a variety of benefits.
Benefits of Hosted VOIP Solutions
There are many benefits of hosted VOIP, including chat channels, video conferencing, and message alerts. None of these are possible with traditional landline phones, so you should consider these VOIP benefits as you decide whether or not to implement VOIP services in your business’s infrastructure. You should also know that VOIP solutions improve and maximize your bandwidth usage by filling in the information gaps in your calls’ recordings. Overall, VOIP’s greatest benefit is its ability to do so many different things and offer so many different services. Its versatility is its greatest strength.
Fewer and Lower Costs
VOIP hosting services and solutions are conducted through an internet connection, so your internet service provider (ISP) handles the costs of the calls you and your colleagues and employees make. Instead of charging you for every single phone call you make the way a traditional business phone system does, your VOIP service costs are included in your monthly ISP bill. Additionally, your hosted VOIP provider should always ensure you have the most current VOIP solutions. When your VOIP provider provides and maintains your VOIP software and hardware, it lowers the costs you would have had if you had to purchase the VOIP software and hardware with your business’s budget. Ultimately, working with a provider to implement VOIP solutions and services will save money in the long run.
Increased Work Space Flexibility
With a hosted VOIP system, your colleagues and employees can work from anywhere and still communicate with on-site employees and with customers or clients. This allows you to let employees work remotely once or twice during the week or hire full-time remote employees, since you’ll know you can always contact them. Additionally, VOIP simplifies conference calls so you can bring clients, customers, or remote employees into your calls as needed. If you want your employees to operate remotely while keeping up their business communications, a hosted VOIP solution will help you do that.
Overall, VOIP’s greatest benefit is its ability to do so many different things and offer so many different services. Its versatility is its greatest strength.
Challenges of VOIP Implementation
When you implement a new service or solution into your business’s infrastructure, you may face challenges as you discover how your business can use it and what the solution or service needs to run well. You may run into the challenges of VOIP implementation, but if you work with a hosted VOIP provider, you can definitely overcome them.
Some VOIP challenges you may face include:
Internet Connection Problems
VOIP phones rely on internet connections to operate properly, so you could run into trouble if your business’s network has a weak connection. If your network has a weak internet connection, it can lead to delays and choppy voice delivery, which reduces the call’s quality. A low-quality connection or broadband can lead to these problems, so if you experience these problems with your VOIP solution, you should consider upgrading your connection to a higher quality one.
Power Outages
A power outage can lead to downtime for a VOIP system because you’ll lose your phone system when you lose your internet connection. There are two ways to combat this problem. Firstly, you can keep one traditional phone line on your premises in case of a power outage.
Secondly, you can factor your VOIP system into your business’s disaster recovery and business continuity plans. Your disaster recovery plan focuses on bringing back your business’s most critical functions after a disaster strikes. A business continuity plan focuses on your business’s long-term recovery from a disaster, and disaster recovery fits with in business continuity. Depending on how critical your hosted VOIP solution is to your business’s functions, you can put recovery steps for it into one of these plans. For instance, if you need your VOIP solution up and running immediately for your customer service department to work with customers in the wake of a disaster, you should put it into your disaster recovery plan.
When you work with a hosted VOIP provider such as CTMS, they will help you manage and maintain your VOIP solution. Then you and your provider can face these and other challenges together and find an actionable solution.
Implement Your Hosted VOIP Solution With Us
At CTMS, we provide hosted business VOIP solutions and services to small businesses so they have access to the same technologies that large enterprises use. If you want to use a VOIP phone service to improve your small business’s communication and collaboration, reach out to us today. We are here to help you bring your phone system into the present.
