Are you losing money by not using business phones?

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.

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. 

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