Will Hosted VoIP Change your Business Workflow?

The market share of VoIP in the telecommunication industry continues to grow with each passing year. Both on premise SIP implementations and hosted VoIP services are multimillion dollar segments within the young industry. While SIP has established itself as the dominant protocol, many businesses continue to favor hosted services for its ease of use and simplicity.

However there are still plenty of enterprises that have yet to make the switch for various reasons. Lack of awareness, knowledge and in-house expertise is a prominent obstacle. Managers like to know what they’re getting into before making any purchase decisions. How will this new technology affect my team/my division/my company? What changes should I make and what are the consequences down the line? Let us take a quick look at how hosted VoIP can change your business workflows.

Familiar yet Different

Every new technology has its own learning curve for both users and the enterprise as a whole. Your employees should familiarize themselves with the new tools and incorporate them into their existing workflows. One of the things that hosted VoIP does not change is the actual voice calling experience.

The most basic function of making or receiving a call remains familiar. If you have a desk phone, you pick it up to answer it and dial a number to make a call. The situation is not very different on a smartphone or tablet. You have the extra step of downloading and installing a softphone application but the rest remains unchanged. The same goes for desktops and laptops. Here the extra step will be to connect a wired or wireless headset to the computer.

Where things change is how you set up and use more advanced features like visual voicemail or digital faxing. With traditional enterprise phone systems, many businesses could not afford to give all employees access to the entire feature set that is available for top executives. VoIP lets you give these features to everyone who needs it. So setting up a group conference call where some people dial in and others use video requires a bit more work.

But learning how to use these features doesn’t need a seminar or training session. Most vendors will have online webinars, manuals and FAQs for your employees to access. This way people can look up the information they need when they need it.

Hosted VoIP Changes Business Workflows

Hosted VoIP may not change workflows in some departments while altering others. Divisions that use phones the most – sales, marketing, customer service, contact centers etc. – will see the most changes. In the beginning, VoIP was nothing more than a replacement for the traditional phone line. Today’s VoIP services offer more bells and whistles. Reputable vendors offer integrations between their VoIP offering and various popular enterprise tools like CRM systems. This means that your sales team will be able to make calls from within the CRM application through the enterprise VoIP lines. Once the call is done, timestamps and other notes can be appended to the sales/customer record. Naturally these changes will affect how things get done within the department.

Hosted VoIP brings a whole slew of features when it comes to interacting with customers. Customer representatives will be able to put callers on hold, invite their bosses to listen in or even interrupt conversations, access calls from an available pool or forward calls to the appropriate voicemail box. Processes that required a dozen or more steps with the old system may now need only a single click to complete.

Hosted VoIP offers new features to complement existing improvements as well. For instance, employees who regularly interact with customers often need to take notes on the conversations. VoIP services that come with automatic call recording can improve productivity and efficiency. You don’t have to rely on staff members remembering to fill in details at the end of the call. You can capture the relevant details for later review automatically.

Individuals within the organization may also change their personal workflows in response to the features offered by hosted VoIP. Suppose an employee’s job requires them to make routine off-site visits to certain client locations. Before they might have had to schedule them for the end of the day because they cannot afford to be away from the phone at any other time. VoIP lets you use a smartphone on the go with your office number. So now they can visit the client whenever it is required and not worry about missing calls.

These are just a few examples to highlight the ways in which hosted VoIP can change your business workflows. Once you deploy VoIP within the enterprise, you might find that employees find new ways of integrating it into their workflows. Don’t be surprised if your productivity soars after switching to VoIP!