VoIP Phone System vs Multi-Line Phone System

Many large businesses still opt for traditional, analogue phone systems with multiple lines. Moving away from existing infrastructure and old investments can seem like a difficult, time-consuming decision, but it doesn’t have to be. Hosted VoIP services like Yay.com can be used right away, without you having to install any hardware to speak of.

In fact, the only waiting you’ll have to do is for the phone number porting process to complete so you can continue to use your existing numbers with our service. This takes about two weeks.

But why would you want to switch in the first place? Your existing system works perfectly fine, right?

Maybe, but business VoIP holds a number of advantages over the traditional multi-line phone system. Let’s take a look at some of them.

1) As many concurrent calls as you like

With the traditional multi-line phone system, you pay a fixed cost for each line. When a line is in use: no other calls on that line. No matter how many desk phones your staff have to take calls with.

With a VoIP phone system, by contrast, the lines are virtual. This means that you’ll never be limited by the number of physical lines you have installed.

In fact, so long as you have enough Yay.com ‘users’, you’ll be able to make as many concurrent voip calls as you have bodies in the office (or working remotely) to answer/make them.

2) Scalability

Similarly, virtual lines, or ‘users’, can be added or removed within seconds from your Yay.com dashboard. There is no need to call out technicians, wait for them to arrive, deal with the disruption of having new phone lines added or removed physically.

Instead, you simply log in and add or remove a user from your account. No need to plan ahead, or stress over when your newest hire will be able to make or receive calls. For a rapidly expanding sales team, for example, this kind of flexibility in scaling is a massive asset.

3) Lower costs

By virtue of never having to call out a technician to scale up/down or maintain your multi-line telephone system, you save money! What’s more, the best VoIP providers will supply VoIP apps with which your staff can make and receive unlimited calls.

These apps forego the need for expensive desk phones, saving you money in hardware costs in addition to the aforementioned maintenance costs.

Even IP phones with video conferencing capabilities and various CRM integrations, which often reach many times the cost of a traditional desk phone, need not be used. Desktop apps and mobile apps alike can make common use of inbuilt front-facing cameras to power video conferencing and other powerful functions, all from the devices your staff already own.

4) Freedom from hardware

The existence of mobile VoIP apps enables 100% portability for your business phone system. With these apps, your staff can take and make business calls from wherever they are.

With your current multi-line phone system, those colleagues who aren’t in the office can’t make calls. There may even have been a make or break moment where a valued member of staff’s change in circumstances elicited a need to work from home. If their role involved taking and making important phone calls all day, this would have been an impossibility with a location-locked multi-line system.

With business VoIP, there’s no need to lose out on such valued members of staff. Calls from the head office and the home office can be qualitatively identical with VoIP, meaning you can hold onto your business’ biggest assets.

5) Higher Quality Calls

Business phone systems are at the forefront of voice calling, technologically speaking. They make use of the best codecs and data transport protocols available in order to maintain call quality even in those locations where a traditional mobile phone call would begin to let you down.

In the office, you may not think this would be an issue, but everyone knows the frustration of taking a call over a bad line. Trying your best to be composed and professional when talking to a muddied, crackling voice (or even worse, being that muddy voice to the other side) can be a thing of the past for you with a VoIP system.

Conclusion

A multi-line phone system offers quite a lot of functionality over the traditional POTS (plain old telephone service). The main advantage is that a single desk phone will no longer be locked into a single phone line, so can field calls to multiple numbers.

Cloud-based VoIP systems go one step further by virtualising all of this, resulting in lower costs, greater scalability and the freedom to leverage modern technology to its fullest extent.