VoIp for business | Benefits of Business VoIP

Deploying VoIP in your business brings several advantages that can make a company more productive as well as cut costs. The low-hanging fruit of VoIP benefits of course is the cost savings, and this is evident across the board, from small and home business operators, to large enterprises. Long distance tariffs are dramatically reduced, and in addition, the cost of equipment is very reasonable compared to a traditional PBX environment. In the case of hosted VoIP business services, the cost of equipment is nonexistent, which makes it possible to obtain service with practically no up-front cost at all.

But cost savings is not the only benefit, and possibly not even the biggest. Some of the other major benefits of business VoIP include:

Additional telephony features

Because VoIP is a digital technology and can take full advantage of computer integration, it is much more possible to add extra features to your VoIP environment. In traditional telephony, these features were either available only at great extra cost, or not available at all. As a result, smaller businesses were often relegated to plain vanilla service, with no frills and very little in the way of extra features. Most VoIP installations come standard with high-end features, including voicemail, portability that allows you to plug in an IP phone into your computer and make calls from any location, free in-network calling, distinctive ringing, and the ability to select numbers from multiple area codes to serve geographically dispersed callers. The benefit of “virtual numbers” is very beneficial to businesses deploying VoIP. This service allows you to obtain phone numbers with different area codes, and sometimes even in different countries depending on your provider, so that a caller from London for example, could call your New York office as if it were a local call.

Integration with productivity applications

Businesses can also get a big boost to productivity by integrating telephony with every-day applications. Doing so may require some additional custom integration and the services of a specialist, but the benefits are undeniable. It is routine for VoIP to integrate with Outlook and other contact managers, allowing you to simply click on a name and place a phone call. More sophisticated integration may tie together the VoIP phone with a customer database, so that when a call comes in, the database pops up automatically and presents a call agent with a summary of the customer’s order before he or she can even answer the phone.

Collaboration

We are in the age of collaboration, and new collaborative technologies such as videoconferencing, web conferencing and web-based meetings are all the rage. The benefits are obvious here too. The technology has advanced so much that a web meeting is just as effective as a face-to-face meeting in many cases, allowing all participants to collaborate, share documents, and even mark up a screen in real time.

Telecommuting
VoIP has also ushered in a new era of telecommuting, working at home, and outsourcing that was never before possible. Partly due to the collaboration, integration, and additional features discussed above, it is easier than ever to work from a remote location and be just as productive or more so than would be possible from the office. The benefits to the company are reduced need for physical office space, and the ability to work with the best and most talented individuals regardless of location.