VoIP Philosophy
If you are like most small business owners, you are doing business in a competitive marketplace, and minimizing costs while maximizing efficiency is important to you. You can leverage VoIP to reduce communications related costs, while maximizing productivity. VoIP offers a variety of distinct benefits versus traditional telephony, including lower costs, self administration and advanced communication features that can translate into competitive business advantages.
Most small businesses make the move to VoIP in order to reduce their monthly costs associated with office telephone usage. Traditional phone service can be quite costly, especially when you have multiple lines, if you are using advanced features like conference calling, or if you are doing a lot of long distance calling and are being charged a per-minute rate for long distance.
Most businesses these days typically have a data network, whether it consists of a cable/dsl router shared by multiple PC.s, or a T1 with internet access distributed through a switched Ethernet network. With VoIP, you can utilize this same data network for phone calls. You can often get rid of your traditional phone lines altogether when you move to an IP based communications solution, and take advantage of the unlimited local and long distance calling offered by many VoIP providers for a flat monthly fee.
Beyond the cost-savings you can realize on your monthly communications bills, you can simplify and streamline your technology infrastructure with VoIP. You can eliminate the need to administer separate voice and data networks by consolidating the two, and pay less to administer, maintain and upgrade your infrastructure over time. You might even consider hosted PBX services, which are offered by many VoIP providers and eliminate the need to purchase or maintain any equipment in-house.
VoIp also offers a wide variety of productivity enhancing features and tools. You can plug your VoIP phone into a broadband internet connection while you are traveling, in a hotel room for example, and place or receive calls just as you would in your home office. Most IP based PBX systems offer voicemail/email integration, eliminate the need to call in over the phone to retrieve voicemail. Voicemail arrives in your email inbox as a multimedia file attachment, and can be accessed conveniently. VoIP systems can also be integrated with many 3rd party office applications including office productivity suites and CRM tools.
