Hosted IP Telephony and Small Business Growth
It is not earth-shaking news that running a small business is tricky business in today’s uncertain economic climate. The last thing any small business owner wants to do right now is sink a whole lot of capital into a phone system. Fortunately, there are options. One of the most promising alternatives to a traditional phone system is hosted IP telephony with voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). Recently, this communication system has shown strong growth among small businesses. For many small business owners, the mention of technology and new seemingly-complicated telephone systems is cause to run the other way. However, this article should put them at ease by taking a brief look at hosted IP telephony and showing why such systems are growing among small businesses.
Having a reliable communications system for your business is essential to the success of the enterprise. For this reason, business owners cannot afford to play games with the office telephone system. It is important to have a grasp of just what is meant by hosted IP telephony. Let’s start with the term telephony. Quite simply, the word refers to the technology utilized for telephone communication. Hosted IP telephony then is a telephone system that is contained off-site and maintained by a service provider. This arrangement certainly saves the small business the space that would be necessary to house a full telephone system as well as the on-going expense of purchasing and maintaining the components of the telephone system. Saving space and money are definitely important benefits for small businesses.
One of the biggest concerns of small businesses is that larger competitors have an advantage in the use of communication technology. With the latest advances in hosted IP telephony, that is no longer the case. Many of the state-of-the-art systems feature the following:
- Random Distribution of Calls allows small businesses to send incoming customer calls to the best person to help them rather than directing them to a single overloaded agent.
- Call Forwarding enables calls to follow the appropriate employee in order to cut down on misrouted calls.
- Auto Attendant sends incoming calls to a greeting and then onto a self-service voicemail directory.
- Conferencing Capability enables small businesses to conduct telephone conferences via VoIP systems.
- Expanded Voicemail may seem like a standard feature without any great benefit. However, the newest telephony allows user access of voicemail from a variety of devices such as PDAs and laptops.
Small businesses have increasingly adopted hosted IP telephony as a means of meeting the growing challenges presented by the globalization of commerce. Without the financial or network resources available to larger competitors, small businesses must count on having a reliable data network in order to level the playing field.
For more information on how hosted ip telephony can help your small business visit us at www.invoip.com.