infoTECH Feature

March 28, 2017

Three Reasons Your IT Team Needs VoIP

VoIP or Voice over IP is especially useful when businesses want to gain and use communication to different areas all over the world. In most cases, voice communication is expensive. Making phone calls to people on the other side of the world, for example, can be very costly for businesses. However, VoIP has been shown to offer many advantages to businesses related to cutting the costs of calls. The feature also provides many other benefits to companies.

The following traits are some of the most useful ones, especially when it comes to adding value to businesses.

VoIP can play the role of a change catalyst

Businesses have to change their technologies for them to remain competitive, and VoIP can take the role of the catalyst for this change. For example, the past technology is already limited by many drawbacks, forcing many businesses to replace its aging apps and systems with the new ones. For example, many businesses still depend on the telephone system that has worked well in the past. Nevertheless, the new technologies that many employees have now adopted, including the use of modern communication apps and devices, have made telephony systems redundant. When compared to other current voice modes, for example, mobile and Web-based systems, the older telephone systems cannot support the manner in which people work and communicate in modern workplaces. For example, virtual and modern workspaces are becoming common, and workers cannot be overly productive when they are entirely dependent on their desk telephones.

Besides, current workers significantly depend on their Web-based communication modes, including video, chat and email, and VoIP is useful as it incorporates all these into its communication system. As the older communication system fades off, the many benefits of connection become apparent. For example, VoIP is not a standalone system. It also adds value to companies and businesses by incorporating other applications of information and data. Such abilities are useful for businesses as it makes it possible for workers to use and mix all forms of communication. VoIP also makes it possible for companies to move their phone systems to the cloud.

VoIP can improve performance and productivity

VoIP can make workers perform better and become productive in many ways. Some of the best ways through which the system can increase productivity have to do with ad hoc conferencing and visual voicemail features of VoIP. It offers alerts for emails with MP3 audio systems for all voice messages. This makes it easier for workers to manage their call systems from different locations. With today’s virtual offices, the ad hoc audio conferencing feature is also important because it makes collaboration between employees possible in ways that past technologies could not.

Besides, the real-time feature and nature of voice communications make collaboration increasingly efficient and productive, especially when it is put against near-real-time systems like chats and email. All these are ways businesses can improve the performance and productivity of their teams and systems by making communication and collaboration easy. Many firms see productivity and performance as the determinants of a company’s competitive edge. Therefore, they can use VoIP to sustain their competitive advantage by making sure that their teams are performing at the highest and most collaborative levels possible.

VoIP reduces operational costs

Many companies choose to use VoIP over other systems because of its cost-cutting feature, which often results in savings of between 20 and 30 percent. Businesses often switch to the system as a measure for saving costs because of a couple of reasons. One is the particular need to reduce costs related to telephone use, mainly as near- free or free services, including Skype (News - Alert) and chat services, become more common in businesses. The other reason would be a wider requirement by the management to decrease operational costs whereby all features, systems, and applications under the domain of IT would be applicable.

Shifting to VoIP will address such goals immediately but the magnitude of these savings will be felt over time in the organization.  Companies, for example, can realize significant savings for the VoIP services immediately, as the monthly charges are often less than the typical telephone services. Furthermore, long distance calls would be free and foreign calls would cost less. This would mean essential bottom line savings for companies. Some of the specific savings could result from notable cost reductions that come with the network convergence offered by VoIP where telephone traffic moves to the data network.

The shift to VoIP can also offer businesses hardware savings because the costs associated with IP-based applications and telephone communication will be significantly less when compared to the prior technologies. VoIP makes use of the Internet and, therefore, the only costs businesses incur are those associated with the monthly Internet bills. However, to realize these cost savings advantages, companies would need broadband Internet access with high speed. 




Edited by Alicia Young
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