With many individuals abandoning phone lines in favor of a combination of cellular phones and Voice-over Internet Protocol voice communications packages, a number of business owners are starting to consider whether or not the advantages of VoIP calling packages can help their firms in the same manner that it is helping individuals. For many companies, especially service-based firms that are heavily reliant on technology, VoIP calling packages can not only improve the cost of doing business, but can change the manner in which a company does business, dramatically increasing the size of their potential market along the way.

As many people already know, Voice-over Internet Protocol is a voice communications technology that enables users to make phone calls over the internet rather than using traditional phone lines. VoIP phones convert speech into packets of data that is sent over a high speed internet connection to another phone, where those data packets are reassembled back into speech. The phones, the manner in which users operate them and the quality of the sound are virtually identical to that of landline telephone systems, with the exception that VoIP networks use IP phones which are plugged into an Ethernet (internet) jack rather than a traditional phone jack.

The primary and most often cited benefit to switching to VoIP phone service is cost. VoIP phone service costs drastically less than traditional landline phone service and those savings are especially significant in cases wherein a company makes a large number of long-distance and/or international phone calls. This fact is often reason enough for businesses to make the switch, as it opens the possibility of a company reaching out to international markets or partnering with foreign firms without having to worry about a significant increase in communications costs. Given the increasing connectivity of the business world, VoIP savings in this area are often substantial.

These savings make a great deal of sense for high-technology firms, as VoIP phone service requires the use of some internet bandwidth, a resource that technology firms generally need to have in abundance. While cost savings and the utilization of already available resources such as available bandwidth are important, VoIP can also change the way that firms communicate by offering a number of communications features generally reserved for business telephone systems that often times lay far outside the budgetary constraints of small and medium-sized businesses.

Some of the available features of VoIP phone systems include auto attendants and dial-by-name directories, which help route calls more efficiently while at the same time helping small businesses appear more professional than a simple voice-mail system can. Additionally, virtual departments and call queuing make the customer facing presence of a small business much more streamlined and professional, and call group features allow inbound calls from clients to be routed to all available personnel in a given department, vastly improving the customer experience with a firm over traditional voice-mail systems, which can result in annoying games of phone tag.

In addition to the streamlining features outlined above, VoIP phone systems often enable businesses to improve employee efficiency with innovative features such as voice-mail-to-email routing, which converts voice-messages into emails and automatically sends them to the recipient’s email inbox, allowing employees to access voice-mail from any mobile device that reads email. Find-me/Follow-me features allow calls to be routed to other office locations, and businesses need not determine how many “lines” they need with VoIP systems, instead simply determining how many extensions they need, each with an individual phone number.

All of this means that in addition to saving money on calling costs, VoIP phone systems allow small businesses to harness the power of expensive business telephone systems previously the domain of large multi-national corporations. Streamlining call features will reduce the inefficiency involved in manually transferring calls, allowing employees to focus on more important tasks, all the while improving the customer experience. Perhaps best of all, VoIP allows highly mobile businesspeople to access the company communications systems from anywhere, anytime, cutting the chains that tie them to the office. Lastly, with a VoIP system, businesses can start to consider the expansion of their client base outside their region or country, to virtually unlimited global markets without incurring any significant increase in communications costs, meaning that VoIP can completely change not only how companies communicate, but how they do business, and, more importantly, with whom.

By: Sam D Goddard