If you’re already familiar with VoIP, there’s a good chance it’s because you’ve seen a television advertisement for residential VoIP services. VoIP technology lets you have normal voice conversations with other people using the Internet to transmit the calls, instead of standard telephone lines. When you start considering using VoIP service in your business, you’ll need to keep in mind the significant differences between business and residential VoIP offerings.
Residential VoIP is often quite low priced, but generally does not allow your family to make more than one call at a time. You will almost certainly need your business VoIP service provider to support your ability to make multiple calls simultaneously.
When you start to research the offerings available from the various VoIP service providers, you’ll find a number of ways that using VoIP can benefit your business.
Cost. Perhaps the most obvious advantage that VoIP offers over traditional telephone services is cost. While it’s important to note that VoIP is not all about making “free” telephone calls, the service fees are generally much lower. In addition, setting up new service will almost certainly be much cheaper than starting new multi-line service from your local telephone company.
Because VoIP traffic uses your existing Internet connection, you may not incur any additional bandwidth charges (or, if you need additional bandwidth, the cost will simply be for increasing the level of your Internet connection, rather than getting an entirely new service leading into your office).
Convenience. VoIP telephony fits well into a “unified messaging” experience that can make your employees much more efficient, and allow them to better serve your customers. Unified messaging means that nearly every kind of business communication (e.g., telephone calls, voicemails, emails, faxes, teleconferences, etc.) is a package of information that can be delivered to all necessary recipients by any available means, which can include any office phone, computer, cell phone or smart phone.
Maintenance. Using VoIP will likely make things easier on the person in your company who handles your IT and infrastructure maintenance (whether that’s a dedicated staff or individual, or just you). VoIP telephony relies upon standard commodity hardware, such as Windows and/or Linux based PC systems, so they’re much easier to setup and troubleshoot compared to specialized equipment. Because VoIP runs on existing infrastructure (your Internet connection and internal network), there’s no need to learn an entirely new and separate technology. Because most VoIP systems also have relatively simple and intuitive interfaces for users, your employees can often make simple changes to their own extension setups.
Ultimately, whether VoIP is right for your business depends on your current and future needs. However, for businesses with a need for more than a single telephone line, the combination of cost savings and increased convenience over traditional phone service is hard to beat.
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