VoIP Phone Systems: How Your Business Can Benefit

New technologies such as VoIP phones don't just replace previous technologies. They also give you much greater functionality, make you more productive, enhance your customer service and save you money compared to older technologies.

Consider the advantages that a well-designed VoIP phone system can provide you with:

• Any and all of your offices, no matter where they are located, can act as one single office. This means you can eliminate long distance costs when calling any of your locations. This is sometimes called "Seamless extension dialing" and is one of the primary benefits of business VoIP phone service.

• VoIP phone service can save you money (and give you more features) compared to your existing carrier. For example, you can connect all your offices together on your own private network. Or, if you like, you can use the carriers 'private' network.

  What this means is that you are free to use one service provider to give you the voice trunks at each office. Meanwhile, your voice traffic between your locations stays on the private network -- and never has to travel through the public internet.

  If you do this right, you get the benefit of moving your voice traffic over the same network that carries your data traffic between your different locations. This means that you have Quality of Service to give voice priority over data. This will also save you money versus the old way of a totally private network connecting your offices.

• Connecting all your telecommuting employees is a snap. They can be easily connected to your office phone system with a high speed Internet connection via DSL or broadband cable.

  The way it works is that your employee uses a VoIP phone from your office and connects it to their Internet connection at home. Or, if they prefer, they can use software on their computer at home and make (and receive) calls through their PC.

  In short, they can be anywhere in the city, state, country or anywhere in the world for that matter -- and still be part of your office phone system. They keep all their individual settings.

  When someone calls your office, the call can be configured to ring at your employee's home. The caller won't
  

  
  
  know (or care) where your employee actually is.

  This arrangement can be made to work for large corporations as well as small businesses with just a few employees.

• No matter where you go, you can connect to your office phone system. For example, imagine you're on the road. Imagine you're staying at a hotel with a high speed Internet connection. If you have your laptop and if it has the appropriate VoIP phone software, you can use a headset on your laptop or a handset that plugs into a port on your computer. You can now receive and make calls the same as if you were sitting at your desk at the office. Anyone calling you will ring through to your laptop-connected VoIP phone.

  In short, you can be anywhere in the world. Anyone you call (or anyone who calls you) won't know where you are -- and it won't matter either.

  Fact is, with VoIP it's pretty easy to take a regular office phone and set it up on your laptop with its Internet connection, if you're going to be away from the office for any length of time.

  On the flip side, if any employee travels to another one of your business locations, they can sit down, log on the phone system -- and they'll have all their phone settings available to them.

• VoIP phone software upgrades are much easier to perform. Generally speaking, you can do it yourself, instead of paying the VoIP phone equipment vendor to do it for you.

  And another thing: you don't need to completely get rid of your current phone system. You can do it in phases -- slowly bringing in a VoIP phone system into your company over time.

  There are lots more benefits to VoIP phone systems. Hopefully, this short overview will pique your interest enough to encourage you to look into it some more. So feel free to explore the strategic implications of VoIP phone technology.

  All of the major phone system vendors are putting R & D money into developing VoIP phone system solutions. Thousands of businesses have already converted over to VoIP phone service.

Conclusion

The more you look, the more you'll realize that you have a much greater possibility for functionality, more productivity, better customer service -- and you can save money too.