5 Good reasons to move to a cloud based phone service:
I very much doubt that anyone currently in business has not heard of VoIP – but you may not have a complete understanding of how it works and what its benefits are.
At the most basic level, all you are doing is running the phone call over the internet rather than over the telephone line. In a typical business phone system setup you will have a box on the wall (the PBX) with a number of ISDN lines going into it, and all your business phones connect into the PBX to handle their voicemail, call routing and so on.
In a hosted VoIP system, this PBX is hosted on the internet and the business phones connect to it via your ADSL or Fibre connection in order to get all the services and make calls.
So why is this better??
1. Cost Savings
VoIP Reduces cost across the whole infrastructure. All of the data and voice traffic is transmitted over the structured cat 5 or cat 6 cabling, which removes the need for a dedicated PBX cabling infrastructure. The setup and initial hardware costs are less than with a traditional PBX, and the ongoing costs are also significantly less when looking at the cost of international calls and VoIP apps for smartphones enabling free to office calls when in a wireless or 4g area.
2. Flexibility
A key benefit of the VoIP system is that as the PBX is in the internet space, as long as your phone is connected to the internet, then it will behave as a member of that ring group, regardless of its physical location. This means that in the event of a power loss at the office for example, employees could physically pick up the phone, take it home and plug it into the home network and the phone would ring and operate in exactly the same way as it would in the office. In fact, your VoIP phone does not even have to be physical! You can have VoIP ‘softphones’ as apps on your smartphone or programs on your laptop to allow you to function within your office environment no matter where in the world you are.
NPIT have been our maintenance contractors for the past 5 years and helped us by introducing a totally cloud based system that helped us expand at a much faster rate with relative ease. In particular NPIT’s VoIP phone system reduced our phone bills by 70%!P Ulivi – Director – Pickwick Estates Ltd
3. Redundancy
The main benefit of your PBX being held off-site is that any physical problems that negatively affects your office in terms of power or internet connectivity, do not affect the PBX and can therefore be minimised. This is achieved by having a fail–over to mobile. One call to the service provider enables instant incoming calls directly to the mobiles of the employees.
4. Feature Rich
With VoIP, a lot of the services that cost extra in a traditional PBX, come as standard – these are things such as auto attendant, time conditions (when the office is open or closed and specific messages for each), voicemail to email, fax to email, conference rooms and many more.
5. Non-geographical
The phone number you choose is not fixed to your location. If you have an office in London for example, and move out to Kent to take advantage of cheaper rents – you still keep the same number. This is extremely useful as previously when moving offices a large distance, you would not be able to keep your number. In addition to this you can migrate your existing PSTN number INTO the cloud so that as your business grows and you move into using a VoIP service, you do not have any problems with telling customers a new number.
So there you have it! If you would like a demonstration, or have any questions, please call NPIT on 020 8676 4441 and we will show you how VoIP can benefit your business and save you money.
