If you're a business owner,
you're concerned about your bottom line, aren't you?
Especially if you're the
owner of a small-to-medium enterprise, you're watching every dime, or you're
looking to make the most of every dollar you spend.
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| Are you losing money by not using business phones? |
And as a savvy business
owner, you know that up-to-date communications is a cornerstone of how business
is done today. Consider the way the market is — consider globalization, the
fact that some of your customers and clients might be half a world away —
doesn't it make sense to make the most of your communications dollar?
It's hard to take
advantage of that if you're still tied to a Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS).
If you're still using copper wires connected to a telephone company, you're
paying more for long distance calling, and you're choking on exorbitant
international calling bills every month.
Not only that, but your
under powered network will only take you so far. It will give you voice service,
to be sure. It will give you limited data service, in the form of DSL
communications (assuming the other end is similarly equipped). It will give you
fax capability. And it will give you limited video capability — and in this
case I mean small and stutter-y.
Is that how you want your
business to be represented in the year 2015? Perhaps if you're selling spinning
wheels or vintage clothing, it doesn't really matter. But if you want to be
seen as a modern, sophisticated business tycoon, you need to step up your
communications game and get into the world of VoIP.
What is VoIP? The acronym stands for Voice over Internet Protocol, and what it means is major cost
savings for you as a business owner. It also means much greater flexibility for
you and your employees, as they will no longer be chained to their desks. It
enables much richer connections between your employees as well as with your
clients, and it offers many other wonderful convenience features, such as an
auto-attendant. This module will answer the phone for you, greet the caller,
and then allow them to dial what extension or department they want. It will
allow you to cut a little overhead by getting rid of that receptionist that
wasn't doing anything but reading magazines all day anyway.
Another thing to
investigate as you're entering the modern world of communications is SIP trunking. SIP stands for Session Initiation Protocol, which is a standard
protocol for starting a logical user session that contains user elements like
virtual reality, gaming, voice, chat, and/or video. It combines these data
streams on the same line using IP communications, obviating the need for a
separate line for each. Centralized SIP trunking makes an IP-based
communications system more secure.
One other prime benefit
that you'll gain access to when you start using proper business phones is UC,
or Unified Communications. This is
another suite of tools that has been developed which has the overall effect of
helping communications to be more intuitive, richer, and by and large simply
easier.
UC makes contact
management so much easier, since it consolidates all of your contacts across
all of your devices. No more deleting of duplicates, or messy merging,
wondering if you've gotten everything in its proper spot.
Remote Access is another
benefit that UC offers, meaning that it will ring a person's desk first, then
after a predetermined number of unanswered rings, it will start to ring their
home phone. After that it will ring their mobile, and only after that doesn't
pick up will it go to voice mail.
One more benefit that you
can get from UC is that it enables easier access to company resources and
experts. If an employee has a question about a process, and can simply access
the company wiki from wherever they happen to be, then that's a godsend for
that person. Same goes for any experts that your enterprise might happen to
have on a retainer.
There are many other
benefits that UC offers — I simply don't have the room to talk about them all
here. If you're not using business phones already, then you really owe it to
yourself to check them out and give them a try.
Author Bio
Michelle
Patterson is nice to be with the new technologies which are threatening to change
the way we stay in touch and communicate, particular in business. She works
with companies that are introducing these technologies to make understanding
them easy for regular people.
Of Interest:
