Why Your Business Needs VoIP

Published on 2008-11-26 10:24:40 by Alan Harten

Savings In the current economic climate, many businesses need to re-assess many areas of how they conduct business in order to become more cost-effective and achieve greater productivity without increasing overheads.

One area worth re-assessing is how businesses communicate and if technologies such as VoIP can prove an efficient way to interweave video, audio, and data services into one single program. Here are some indicators as to why VoIP may be an extremely effective medium for your business communications.

Cost Reduction With VoIP

Telecommunications are an absolutely essential ingredient of modern business. We now use a vast array of different methods to communicate with customers, suppliers and company staff.

Apart from basic telephone use, we now heavily rely on the Internet and through it, e-mail, as well as mobile phones, mobile broadband and a whole host of ways to make contact.

VoIP is an effective tool for handling web applications, e-mail and basic telephone needs especially in the area of customer service, the main attraction of using VoIP is that it is capable of handling all these different tools in one handy package.

Making use of one platform is a highly productive and cost efficient way to combine all kinds of software applications as well as accounting, call handling, E-mail and a whole host of other applications with just one platform.

For some businesses, the massive cost of large numbers of long distance and international telephone calls can be very financially draining. VoIP will bring a huge reduction in long distance telephone bills as well as savings in bandwidth usage by its clever bundling together of many functions.

VoIP, Ideal For Call Centers

Call centres are quickly moving across to the use of VoIP as the standard tool. The benefits for Call Center operators are very substantial including being highly cost-effective and flexible while at the same time having the capability of enhancing customer service applications.

Before the introduction of VoIP, call centres were large rooms filled with hundreds of phone lines and staff. This was an effective solution but financially exacerbating, as a call centre had to be located in an expensive central location to allow staff ease of access.

By making use of VoIP, a call centre no longer needs to be located in one place. Call centre staff can now be spread across the world they can work in different offices in different cities and can even work from home.

Not providing one large central office in a western city massively reduces costs, as this is no longer a need to be overly concerned about the cost of long distance telephony. Call centres are now often located in developing nations such as India and the Philippines where English speaking staff are plentiful and salaries are a fraction of western rates.

VoIP is also far more efficient at handling customer service calls because of its integration of different needs such as the actual telephone call and the information that the call centre staff need to retrieve. Integrating all the software into one system means that call centres can have a total overview of everything they need to efficiently deal with customer service.

VoIP And On The Road Employees

When companies have a lot of staff out on the road they are usually provided with a cell phone by the company. By making use of VoIP, companies can have permanent contact with employees for a fraction of the cost of mobile phone calls.

By making use of VoIP a customer's call to an employee's desk will be automatically re-routed to their cell phone should they be out of the office. This avoids customers and staff becoming frustrated by playing telephone tag instead of doing business.

Out of the office, employees can also bring up all kinds of information such as their e-mail making use of the VoIP service, allowing them to assist customers with the same capabilities as if they were back at the office.

VoIP For Global Conferencing

VoIP can prove extremely cost-effective by cutting down on the high costs of transportation of employees from one location to another. By making use of VoIP, training can be carried out without the gathering of staff at head office, which will usually also save on accommodation costs.

Genuine Global conferencing via VoIP allows contact between executives or staff regardless of their location in the world saving huge amounts on the cost of flights and days of wasted staff time.

VoIP technology allows conferencing via totally secure connections for either voice or video conferencing requirements that also take advantage of low-cost telephony connections.

Flexibility And High Productivity With VoIP

By making use of a regular VoIP Phone Adapter, businesses can enjoy the flexibility of taking one telephone number with them wherever they go in the world. This is a simple but highly effective productivity tool allowing staff to continue to interact with customers and other employees with ease regardless of their location.

If a customer wants to call an employee while he is on business in America or even in Asia the customer will only pay for a call to the employee's office and would not even be aware that the member of staff was actually halfway across the world.

Regardless of location, staff can make use of all kinds of applications such as e-mail and fax as well as other PC apps that allow them to access the information they need and forward it on to whoever may require that information.

VoIP customers can even select telephone numbers with area codes in different parts of the country or even in different parts of the world to save on customer's telephone bills, for their convenience, with no increased cost to the business.