A reliable and secure phone service is essential for business success. Thanks to widely available reliable high-speed Internet networks, it is now possible for businesses to leverage their existing Internet connection to make secure phone calls with a hosted PBX.
What Is PBX?
Private Branch Exchange (PBX) is a private telephone network within a company or organization. It allows users to communicate internally with other employees of the company as well as externally with clients, partners, and more. Basically a fancy way of saying big expensive telephone system.What Is Hosted PBX?
A hosted PBX, like the one offered by Unite Communications, is a cloud-based PBX phone system that offers a reliable and secure phone service for a business or organization via the Internet as opposed to a privately managed network that the business owns and operates itself. In other words, a big fancy telecom system without the price, need to install or maintain any equipment!
How PBX Works
Modern PBX phone systems use Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) systems to send digital signals to and from users. By leveraging an Internet connection, VoIP technology allows businesses to make simple calls as well as take advantage of the most advanced and convenient features of PBX phone systems, like voicemail to email. The hosted PBX system converts an incoming call into a digital signal and manages it just like any other piece of digital information. This is what allows a digital PBX system to route incoming calls to almost any device. In the days of proprietary PBX systems, a company would need to invest heavily in setting up the system with expensive equipment as well as constantly maintain and update the system. These systems were typically customized to the particular business and it would be hard to move away from if the company decided to change its telecommunications strategy. On the other hand, a hosted PBX requires very little upfront investment. The infrastructure is set up and managed via the cloud by the service provider and the calls can be routed to devices the company already owns and uses. An organization simply pays a monthly fee to use the hosted PBX. Any maintenance or updates are done by the service provider, eliminating the need to hire and train in-house IT specialists.How Hosted PBX Can Help Small Businesses
For small businesses, cost savings and flexibility are crucial to success. And it’s equally important to stay in touch with partners, colleagues and clients on a stable and reliable connection. Hosted PBX gives you all the upside of PBX with none of the downside.
Hosted PBX Helps Businesses Cut Costs
As mentioned above, on-site phone systems are extremely costly for a couple of reasons. The first is that you need to purchase a lot of equipment up front. This is valuable capital you could be spending elsewhere in your business. What’s more, small business owners and employees don’t spend their entire day behind a desk near a landline. Hosted PBX allows you to receive a call on equipment you already own, like a cell phone, landline, laptop or desktop. Hosted PBX goes even further than traditional PBX services. It offers the same real-time voice and collaboration experience as a traditional PBX as well as advanced calling features for just one monthly fee. Finally, you eliminate your maintenance costs with a hosted PBX and you don’t have to deal with equipment failures or updates. All the back-end equipment is owned and maintained by the service provider so you don’t ever have to think about it.Features of Hosted PBX Systems
As mentioned above, hosted PBX systems come with a wide range of standard and advanced features. Here are some of the most interesting:Extension dialing
A hosted PBX phone system allows you to establish a single telephone number for your business and assign phone extensions to your employees. This greatly simplifies things for anyone trying to reach your business as they only have to know one number.Business hour settings
If someone tries to reach your business outside of business hours, you can route that call to a different phone number. This would allow you to redirect calls to branches that are still open in other time zones or to a 24/7 customer support line.
Caller queues
Everyone can agree that waiting on hold is less than ideal. However, it helps to know how long the wait time is. With a PBX phone system, you can let callers know how long they’ll likely be on hold before they can get through to someone. This can improve your customer service by managing expectations and encouraging people to stay on the line.Call conferencing
Conference calls are a key component of communication for any business. A hosted PBX system gives you the ability to easily set up conference calls to streamline meetings, improving workflow and productivity.Voice-to-email
Because a hosted PBX phone system uses the Internet to receive incoming calls, users can set up the system to receive incoming voicemails as an email sent automatically to their inbox while also saving the voicemail in its original form on a phone. This makes it easy to check your voicemail no matter where you are or what device you’re working on.Call recording
A hosted PBX phone system allows you to easily record incoming and outgoing phone calls. This can help train new customer service employees as well as archive phone calls for future reference.
