Large businesses may find themselves concerned about how suitable a VoIP phone system will be for them. The good news is that VoIP is incredibly well suited for businesses of all sizes. Not least since, by virtue of being programmatically-based, rather than relying on on-site hardware, VoIP boasts great scalability.
The not-so-good news is that IP-based phone systems will, in time, be the only option available to you, meaning their demand is only going to increase. As we all know, price follows demand in any marketplace, meaning the great prices associated with VoIP today may not be around by the time those who choose to sit and wait get around to acting.
Let’s discuss some of the characteristics that make VoIP so well-suited for large businesses.
Bulk Deployment Options
Any good VoIP provider should make it easy for you or your IT manager to set up their platform. After all, all other things being equal, less work for an already busy system administrator is likely to be a winning selling point.
At Yay.com, our bulk deployment methods make it effortless to roll out our VoIP apps to every member of staff, no matter whether you’re a business of three or three thousand. Principally, these work by passing on the simple, easy task of installing to each member of staff individually. Two minutes of work for a hundred employees beats two hundred minutes of work for one IT manager.
No matter which VoIP provider you’re considering, it’s worth looking for tools such as this to ensure that migrating to VoIP is as efficient a process as possible. Since, for large businesses in particular, concerns about the administrative hassle of migrating a system with ties to every single employee in the business abound, any tool or feature that guarantees an effortless migration is bound to impress.
Unified Communications
The best VoIP providers are likely to be forward-thinking, ambitious companies and their programmatic-base makes it comparatively easy for them to add new features and capabilities to their service. Often, these are limited only by the provider’s creativity and ambition.
More and more, VoIP providers are beginning to evolve into fully-fledged Unified Communications services, offering a suite of features including secure video and chat messaging for businesses, alongside their existing voice offerings.
Such features give businesses and their employees more ways than ever before to communicate and collaborate, both amongst colleagues and between staff, customers and clients.
When all of these handy features can be paid for and accessed from a single platform, it makes handling your business’ communications outlets a breeze and, for large businesses, anything that eases the administrative burden is a plus.
Scalable Savings
When it comes to business VoIP, savings are a given across the board. From monthly service fees, to call costs, to hardware maintenance fees (there are none), your business can benefit from savings.
Often, these savings are significant, too. When it comes to calling internationally, for example, a call from the UK to the US would cost you 55p/min at BT’s standard international rate. With a VoIP provider like Yay.com, on the other hand, the same call would cost you 1.5p/min. That’s a saving of more than 97%.
Perhaps the most important point to note when it comes to savings, though, is that savings are scalable right along with your VoIP phone system. Since the system permeates the business right down to every last employee that makes or takes calls, any per-user costs or savings scale right along with them.
Desk phones, for example, are not cheap. If you choose to use VoIP apps, though, you save 100% of the cost of a desk phone for every employee in the business. When you factor in that a BYOD (bring your own device) model of working also seems to improve job satisfaction and productivity, you have a decision that benefits the business on multiple fronts.
Advanced Features
With a traditional phone system, you’d expect basic features to be in place. With VoIP, these basic features are all available on the cheapest of plans. Call forwarding, call monitoring, call queues, all of these and more are available on a VoIP phone system.
What’s truly groundbreaking, however, is the number of features available with VoIP that would be utterly impossible with a traditional business phone system. Auto-generated reports on outbound call statistics, call recording with automatic cloud-storage syncing, call queuing with custom-recorded audio that can be altered or updated in just a couple of clicks… All of this and more is available on a VoIP phone system.
When combined with meta-features for your communications like video conferencing and secure business chat services, it becomes clear that VoIP phone systems and Unified Communications services are light years ahead of your old phone system.
Backwards Compatibility with Existing Hardware
As we discussed in a recent post, too, VoIP phone systems are backwards-compatible with your old hardware. If you have an on-site IPBX, you can use your VoIP provider’s SIP trunking service to route calls via the internet. If you have analogue desk phones you want to use with VoIP, you can use VoIP adaptors (devices like the microfilter that sits between the router and the telephone line in your home’s VDSL network setup). Finally, as already discussed, VOIP apps are always an option for any business, making setup of your new business phone system effortless and cost-free.
Conclusion
If yours is a large business, the move to VoIP doesn’t have to be difficult or costly and, once you have moved, you’ll find yourself benefitting from features that would be impossible with a traditional phone system. If you’re adamant about continuing to use legacy hardware, too, you’ll be happy to hear that VoIP is backwards compatible with most of what you’ll want to use.
If you’re interested in VoIP for your business, but aren’t quite sold yet, you might find it useful to sign up for a free VoIP trial with Yay.com now to try out our features today.