Business Efficiency and your VoIP Phone System

The biggest draw for companies looking to VoIP is cost. Compared to the hefty amounts charged by phone operators for enterprise class phone service (especially international calling), hosted VoIP is pretty inexpensive. But though the cost is what attracts organizations to VoIP at first, they quickly realize that VoIP phone systems can dramatically improve business efficiency as well.

How Can VoIP Phone Systems Help Business Efficiency?

One of the biggest advantages for businesses using VoIP services is that calls between employees within the organization are free. It doesn’t matter where the employees are located – whether they work from home, a client site or sit at a desk all day. You can have offices in different states and still call colleagues for free.

Since VoIP calls are routed over the Internet instead of physical wires, your company benefits from not having to pay the operator for calls that do not touch the PSTN at any point. It works on the same principle as email – you don’t have to pay anyone just to send an email and it doesn’t matter where you are sending it from either.

Improve Collaboration

You might very well ask how this translates into business efficiency. The answer is simple – free calls generally means better collaboration. When your employees don’t have to worry about racking up huge phone bills, they won’t hesitate to pick up a phone to call team members or other departments within the organization. Better communication almost always gives you quicker results.

Users can also have conference and video calls instead of scheduling meetings, saving both time and cost. Conference calling is not something new but implementing it over VoIP makes it much more inexpensive and also easier to use. This means you will find yourself actually using those tools, instead of forgetting they exist. Most vendors offer video calling and conference calling integrated into their service. So there is nothing to download or setup other than purchasing appropriate hardware or related equipment.

Better Sales and Customer Service

In any company, departments like sales, technical and customer support are the ones that depend heavily on business phone systems. VoIP phone systems come with an amazing set of features that can greatly help users in these teams. For instance, tools like IVR, automated receptionist and group voicemail boxes can help you reach both current and potential customers. Your employees will never miss a call or forget to respond to a voicemail. Little things like this go a long way in building customer trust and confidence. Employees can also reach more customers in a day when they don’t have to waste time in searching for contact information or switching between different software just to make calls.

Integration with Other Enterprise Systems

VoIP phone systems operate using IP protocols instead of telephony standards. It means they are able to integrate with other enterprise software systems like CRM or ERP applications. Information that is locked away in one system can now be accessed by other software. One of the most popular integrations is between hosted VoIP services and CRM software like Salesforce.

Sales agents don’t have to look up information in Salesforce and then switch to a phone to make calls. Depending on how your VoIP phone system integrates with it, they can simply click a button next to the customer’s name to initiate the call. The integration works the other way as well. Once a call is complete, details automatically logged within the Salesforce service. It means that employees don’t have to remember to write down such details. It cuts down on mistakes and errors.

VoIP Phone Systems and WebRTC

These are not the only ways in which your VoIP phone systems can enhance efficiency within the company. For example, WebRTC – a new standard for integrating voice calling within Internet browsers – can also work with VoIP phones. Quite a few companies are experimenting with click to call functionality on their websites by combining WebRTC with VoIP services.

Think of the many ways this can help your business. You can offer real-time video chat with customers for troubleshooting problems with products or services. Or maybe you can have sales teams conduct live demonstrations for potential customers directly to your website. All this and so much more is possible with VoIP phone systems.

Many companies also look at VoIP phone systems as the first step in implementing unified communication tools. UC systems bring together various communication channels such as instant messaging, email, voice calling, video calling etc. into one coherent package. At a time when businesses are changing the way they function, every service you use should be flexible and adaptable as your own needs change with time. We are only beginning to explore what VoIP can do at this point and it’s already proven to be valuable for enterprises. Who knows what we can do with it in the future?