January 4, 2016
Homefield IT
By 2018, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) will have over 1 billion total users — with lowered cost, faster setup and higher productivity being just a few reasons for its immense success over traditional phone systems.
What is VoIP? How did it get so popular?
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) allows you to make phone calls over the Internet using the same technology that enables you to send email and surf the web. Because it’s built on top of your existing network infrastructure and Internet connection, VoIP can save your business the cost of building and servicing a traditional, complex phone network. It can also drastically lower the cost of making long distance calls.
But VoIP isn’t just a way of placing phone calls, it’s a new way of thinking about telephony. With a VoIP system, your phone calls can be processed or transmitted by Internet-enabled devices — just like other data on your network. By integrating your telephone system into your computer network, phone calls and call conferences are available with the click of a mouse, and accessible from within all your productivity applications. This integration brings increased flexibility, mobility, and productivity to collaboration across your company, and a new level of efficiency to your external communications.
Because of the reduced phone expenses, increased convenience, and improved productivity that VoIP delivers, it’s been steadily replacing traditional telephone systems at businesses for over a decade. This trend shows no sign of slowing down. As of now, over a third of American small and medium-sized businesses have already started using VoIP, while another third are looking to make the switch in the near future.
What exactly can you expect from a customized VoIP solution?
Lower capital expenditure
VoIP can piggy-back onto your existing company network — so as long as you have a solid infrastructure, there’s usually no need for major hardware purchases. At ManhattanTechSupport.com, we’re specialists in building and managing the computer networks that underlie VoIP. We can help you implement the perfect mix of hardware and services to get VoIP up and running with minimal capital investment. Say goodbye to the steep costs associated with in-house PBX’s — with a VoIP system these big capital layouts can be reduced to almost nothing. Also, because VoIP makes it easy to scale your system up (or down), you don’t have to worry about wasting your budget on expensive equipment you may never end up using.
Low operating expenses
VoIP not only reduces the usage fees and taxes associated with traditional land-lines, it also brings your cost-per-call down to almost nothing. In fact, many companies that switch to VoIP are able to bring the cost of domestic and domestic long-distance calls down to almost zero, while also slashing the cost of international calls. And because VoIP runs on the same broadband network that provides you Internet and email access, there’s only one network to maintain, saving you the cost of managing internal phone switches and equipment. For these reasons, switching to a VoIP phone service often saves small and medium businesses as much as 45% each month when compared to traditional phone systems.
Increased mobility
VoIP eliminates the hassle of managing different phone numbers for multiple devices by allowing your employees to take their phone numbers with them wherever they go. When someone calls, all their devices (including mobile phone and landlines) can be configured to ring simultaneously, or in succession, so they can always answer immediately no matter where they are. This means faster sales and support response times, and less time wasted listening to voicemails and tracking down missed calls. This also helps employees be productive when they’re away from their desks or working at other locations, and is particularly useful for team members that frequently visit clients or make sales calls.
Increased productivity
VoIP can integrate with your other business applications like email, web browsers, instant messaging, CRM software, and more. With VoIP as a part of your workflow you can do things like start voice calls or teleconferences from within Outlook, or have your CRM automatically display a customer record when they make an inbound call to you (if you use a CRM that supports VoIP integration). This integration helps you consolidate what were once multiple inefficient steps into one continuous, intelligent process that boosts the productivity of your team.
Excellent VoIP requires networking expertise
Although the quality and reliability of the technology has made great progress in recent years, VoIP solutions that are improperly integrated into your company’s network may fail to offer all the benefit they’re designed to provide.
Call quality can sometimes be an issue for poorly implemented VoIP solutions, for example. On networks that haven’t been properly configured, voice packets (your voice data) can get improperly routed or lost, resulting in garbled or unclear communication. Other potential problems include “handling” or “queuing” delays that generate call latency, and further degrade the experience of your VoIP services. These issues can get more complicated with multi-site companies and companies that generate a high degree of network traffic.
What does it take to get VoIP right? To make sure that your VoIP solution best serves your organization, it’s important to find a technical partner that has both the expertise to identify the right VoIP products for your company, and the networking expertise to ensure that your new VoIP system will integrate smoothly into your existing infrastructure. Installing a VoIP system means analyzing all of your network operations from top to bottom, looking for any possible point of failure, then establishing a series of quality-of-service (QoS) protocols to make sure that each of your services — from calls to call-forwarding, voicemail, and fax — all work just the way you need them to. Only then can you expect the outstanding user experience and increased productivity that VoIP is designed to provide.
VoIP Services from ManhattanTechSupport.com
VoIP is helping businesses across the country save money, work more efficiently, and communicate better. Why stay stuck in the past?
ManhattanTechSupport.com has the expertise that businesses in New York City trust for dependable VoIP solutions. We’ll build a VoIP solution that perfectly fits your needs, and make sure it’s installed and configured to work properly with your applications – without issue. Want to learn more? Click this link to speak with someone at ManhattanTechSupport.com for more information about our VoIP services. We’re happy to answer any questions you might have!