Regardless of what your business is about and whether it is big or small, your communication system is often the lifeline for sales, service, and ultimately, supports the growth of your company. If you want to grow your business, make sure your communication system can scale with you, keeping pace with the collaboration needs of your internal teams and your precious customer communication. Let’s explore how you can ensure your company stays connected with customers and is ready for whatever the future holds.
VoIP and IP-Based Technology
Using VoIP and other types of IP-based telephony, you can integrate your phone system easily with your data network and make use of many advanced features.
For instance, in case of an emergency when you or your store manager need to replace a worker who is not feeling well, you will not have to individually call every potential replacement employee. You can notify all of them together and whoever is interested in the extra hours can quickly respond.
In the case of training new employees, you can listen to calls, whisper answers or join the discussion. You can hear first-hand how calls were handled from anywhere and review past conversations with call recording.
Have multiple locations? With VoIP, your system can be fully integrated between towns or state lines. If you’re considering getting your business phone system from your high-speed internet provider, your phones will fail when their internet connection goes down and you’ll not be able to link locations – meaning staff can’t cover for each other when on vacation or sick leave. With VoIP you can seamlessly failover if your local internet drops, power gets interrupted or if staff needs to forward phones to other facilities.
There are many other ways in which VoIP has transformed business communication. They have enabled small businesses to have advanced call handling features, without having to rely on installing capital telephonic networks.
VoIP provides a wide range of options.
Unified Communication Solutions
Initially, the internet voice phenomenon started with VoIP; however, now VoIP has evolved into something more advanced –Unified Communications (UC or UCaaS). With even more functionality, Unified communication systems incorporate messaging, voice and video calling, team collaboration, video conferencing, file sharing … and so much more.
Businesses are benefiting from highly advanced communication tools. Let’s briefly explore how UCaaS differs from VoIP.
When you are using VoIP it carries your voice phone calls over the IP network that you are using for data. In technical terms, this is called a “converged” network. Using VoIP services can enable you to benefit from select functions such as receiving voice messages as audio file e-mail attachments. You can also transfer these call recording (.wav) files online easily. Initially, these services are more than enough for small businesses.
In contrast, UCaaS solutions offer the same VoIP services plus more advanced features that traditional PBXs have afforded large enterprises. Today, business owners can choose from a wide range of options according to their needs. Formerly these features were only affordable by Fortune 500 companies, but today main street entrepreneurs and startups can gain a competitive advantage using these features.
Some of the services include unified messaging, integrated contact centers, and rich-media video conferencing that combines voice, data, and video. When you are using a unified communications system, you can contact all your customers as well as your employees at any point regardless of location, time, or device.
Overall Benefits
We have already seen how these advanced methods of communication can help you get in touch with all your employees easily at all times. Besides saving your team time and effort, VoIP and UCaaS also help improve collaboration and customer service. Lastly, VoIP and UCaaS may help you cut other costs that you would otherwise be spending on things such as texting, call tracking, analytics reporting and more.
These modern business communication systems are highly productive and efficient, and they significantly enhance your business communication capabilities. You can easily move, add or change your phone connections and locations without having to hire specialized staff or contractors. Moreover, these services become even more critical given current conditions enabling workers to telecommute. So long as there’s high speed internet, employees can take home office phones, use mobile apps, tablets or computers to send and receive calls – effectively taking their office anywhere and ensuring business continuity.
Conclusion
Unlike the traditional telephony companies that relied on copper wire to carry conversations, these new VoIP and UCaaS firms using fiberoptic and internet connections are much more flexible, scalable, secure and stable, as well as fully customizable according to your business needs. This makes them the ideal choice to futureproof your firm, knowing they will keep pace with the growth of your business.