The advent of Voice over IP (VoIP) has created an entirely new benchmark of what companies expect from communication technologies. The perks of using Internet connections to make and receive calls, hold conferences, enable collaboration and provide superior customer service make VoIP an ideal technology for companies looking to cut costs and grow their business. The benefits that VoIP seamlessly provides highlight the glaring limitations of legacy phone systems.
Every organization is driven by a mission to grow, without having its infrastructure lag behind and possibly pose a roadblock to capacity increases. With VoIP, the growth of your business never outgrows your technology– VoIP makes scalability smooth, manageable and highly cost-effective.
Scalability simplified
Growing your business means that you’ll need to grow your team. Every team member added will need a phone to perform their daily duties, and setting that up is a considerable task in terms of time and budget. It entails purchasing a new handset, activating a phone line and most likely sourcing the help of a technician. It is not a straightforward task that can be completed by reading a manual. When you factor in scalability, all that becomes compounded.
With VoIP, the process takes minutes. It’s a plug-and-play system that requires minimal configuration and a very basic technical setup. And if your VoIP is powered by Unite Communications, you get 24/7 support to help you add as many virtual phones as you’d like.
Virtual and physical space savings
Having your VoIP in the cloud frees up physical and virtual space that your organization can otherwise use for core business tasks. It can also be aesthetically and functionally pleasing in terms of having a minimal working space that eliminates handsets cluttering desks and offices.
The virtual nature of VoIP becomes especially paramount for businesses utilizing call centers to rout calls. Expanding the capacity of call centers to handle growing business demands is a weighty endeavour, and results in budget constraints that any business can do without. VoIP exempts organizations from added operational costs that simply do not serve a business’s growth.
Free automated call handling
A key advantage of VoIP is how it vastly facilitates outsourcing. Operations related to communications and call routing can be easily assigned to a remote call center or an automated virtual attendant. Businesses save incredible costs with this feature as it allows them to forgo employing internal resources for tasks that are arguably nonessential and unrelated to core business. It helps technology become aligned with what companies prioritize to achieve their goals.
With traditional phone systems lacking the technology to make this functionality even faintly feasible, automated call handling is not even an extra add-on with Unite Communications. It is part of the bundle customers receive when subscribing to Unite, and it doesn’t just end there: it includes local and/or toll-free main number, local and/or toll-free fax number, dial by name directory, a web admin site, email delivery of voice and fax messages, unlimited number of extensions available, teleswap call transfer and many more features.
Portability
VoIP easily achieves portability since handsets are wireless. Users don’t have to be tied down to their offices to make and receive calls nor do they need to use their personal phones for work-related tasks when they are away. They are constantly accessible and connected no matter where they are, and can be reached through a single number assigned to all their devices.
It is easy to see the practicality of VoIP with several roles often requiring out-of-office work, coupled with the emerging work-from-anywhere models. And with scalability being an inevitable goal, it becomes as seamless as ever to do business in international markets and grow your team proportionally.
Boundless cost-efficiency
As organizations’ teams grow and as organizations expand operations to foreign markets, overhead costs related to telephony typically increase. Fortunately, that’s not the case with VoIP, as calls and conferencing fall under the umbrella of any VoIP bundle that is powered by an Internet plan. Basic calls, meetings with dispersed parties and collaborative tools are never things you have to budget for–they are all a standard feature of VoIP bundles.
Peace of Mind – Network Interruptions
A very common roadblock to scalability is the risk of network outages as operations outpace infrastructure growth. Organizations need their networks running with proper backup systems to avoid any network interruptions that, in this day and age, can have innumerable costs.
We know how important it is for your customers, partners and employees to stay connected. A major network interruption, like the one that took place on July 8, 2022, can create an onslaught of problems for your business. Unite’s VOIP has built-in redundancies that can help mitigate a carrier network interruption and provide point-in-time recovery capabilities. Your network data will always keep running regardless of any unforeseen event, such as a system failure, cyber attack or hardware malfunction.
No maintenance costs
Technology upgrades and maintenance costs can become particularly hefty and complicated with expansion plans. VoIP plans spare us all from that, as general care and upgrades happen automatically and are not supplementary projects that need to be planned and budgeted for. The plug-and-play nature of VoIP software means that all users have to do is download and install–maintenance and upgrades are handled by the provider.
When compared to legacy systems, an upgrade happens smoothly without any downtime, technical personnel to implement the upgrade and mammoth hardware costs to replace the existing technology. Users often open their apps and find a new version installed with little to no disruption of daily operations.
Your VoIP plan checklist
It is easy to get lured by all the benefits VoIP affords in terms of drastically cutting costs and fostering collaboration. Even the switching costs are minimal, and not as daunting as one would expect from standard technology overhauls. Nonetheless, it is imperative to look beyond the immediate goals VoIP achieves and think about how it serves strategic goals for growth. When choosing a VoIP provider, you must ask questions to determine how scalable it is:
Does it integrate well with my existing setup?
Does it easily add lines without extended downtime?
Does it accommodate work from home and out-of-office employees?
Does it simplify maintenance and upgrades as business expands?
Does security get compromised as we add more users?
Unite Communications is happy to be not just your VoIP partner, but perhaps your partner in growth. Contact us today to discover how much we can achieve together!
