You may not realize it, but your landline phone system could be hurting your business. Datedness causes pain in many places: your wallet, customer service, and even administration.
Hosted PBX provides a flexible, affordable alternative for businesses looking to boost their communications. To illustrate this fact, here are a few signs that your business needs of a better phone system.
Your Business Craves a Solution More Cost Effective and Scalable
Others in our industry liberally throw around the term scalable. It has become a bit of a buzzword—one that resonates little with newcomers. In essence, scalability refers to a technology’s ability to expand or shrink on demand.
Consider a landline phone system. To add a few more lines, you call your provider and schedule an installation. The technician arrives shortly after, drills a few holes and pulls some cables. That’s both time and money spent.
With a hosted phone system, you simply call your provider or log into your online account. They apply new extensions virtually within minutes. The cost and work involved is minimal. Thus, it’s more scalable than any onsite legacy PBX system.
Maintenance and Repairs
Using the examples above, we can compare IP and landline phone systems in regards to maintenance.
For one, a technician must visit and assess the situation. Perhaps he or she replaces a few components or schedules another appointment. Worse, your company may need to hire dedicated staff to oversee the equipment.
In another scenario, your provider runs diagnostics on your account remotely. The support staff applies a fix or recommends actions to take locally. The experience is brief yet thorough. No waiting with a defective system while someone drives out to look at it.
The second example outlines basic hosted phone troubleshooting. It does not, however, mention IP systems are always upgrading and updating. Thus, datedness is less of a concern.
Modernizing your onsite infrastructure every few years is just unfeasible. You should let your provider worry about that. Doing so is a smart long-term investment as it requires little money to setup and operate.
Long Distance and Internal Calling
Via landlines, international and long distance calling can be costly. Packages with bountiful minutes run companies into the hundreds (or sometimes thousands) of dollars per invoice.
VoIP offers discounted per-minute rates anywhere in the world. The idea of long distance does not exist; calling country-to-country is relatively normalized.
Hosted PBX also offers free internal calling. Larger businesses communicate internally as much as externally. This boon alone promises huge cost reductions. Plus, as we discuss next, internal calling covers more than desk-to-desk calling.
Your Employees Need More Ways to Connect
With increasingly mobile workforces, fewer employees are reachable at their desks during business hours. Yet traditional phone systems insist employees remain seated by their phones.
With an IP phone solution, your employees can connect any smartphone or VoIP phone. Even without internet, you can forward to regular PSTN destinations. How your business controls inbound calls depends on the tools and features available.
Your Business Needs Bigger Telephony Features and a Higher Call Capacity
Regarding scalability, it can come in many forms. Not always do businesses need more extensions; sometimes they need more concurrent inbound calls. Many businesses suffer from busy tones, a problem avoidable with a hosted phone system.
In VOIP, channels determine the number of simultaneous inbound calls. Most systems come pre-bundled with sufficient channels that busy signals are never a concern. That said, should your business experience excessive inbound or outbound traffic, dedicated channels are available.
Features like call queues and IVR menus help handle inbound calls, too. They funnel callers automatically, then halt them until someone can accommodate them. Features your business might enjoy include music on-hold, call transferring, call recording, and conferencing.
Custom Integrations
Many solutions support integrations with other custom services. Thus, other SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) solutions are easily integrated. For example, your marketing automation or CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software. Integrations enhance the uniformity of your business' communications.
Your Business Needs Local Presences around the World
Hosted PBX provides an outstanding solution for global businesses. With virtual numbers available worldwide, your business can maintain a presence anywhere without physically residing in that location. Conversely, hosted PBX can tie together multiple office locations under a single phone system.
To illustrate this point further, a New York business could buy numbers in Japan, France, and Ireland. It could forward all said numbers back to New York. Alternatively, a business with offices in Vancouver and Jerusalem can share the same administration and enjoy free internal calling.
Your Business Wants a Disaster Recovery Plan
As an online solution, your business need not worry about protecting its onsite equipment or data. A local power failure merely takes the office offline—not the phone system. Moreover, call forwarding to mobile and landline phones can protect against local disasters by adding failover.
VoIP phone providers manage their infrastructure in high-end data centers. These are redundant and safeguarded against disasters of their own. To learn more about hosted PBX and business continuity, read our old blog post about it here. Similarly, check out our article on Uninterruptible Power Supplies.
