Using the internet to carry phone calls – rather than the copper wires favored by traditional phone companies – has enabled a revolution in business telephone service provision. VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) providers can help your business in many ways. If you are looking for information on small business VoIP phone lines, or trying to find out exactly how it could help your business, here are 8 ways VoIP technology could lower your telephone costs and revolutionize the way you use telephones.
1. Costs
Probably the most immediate benefit VoIP technology offers a business is to reduce its bills. Without an expensive network to maintain, calls made over the internet are markedly cheaper than traditional phone calls – whether made locally or internationally. Set up costs are minimal as it uses your existing broadband connection.
2. Flexibility
Freed from a physical phone network VoIP allows you to have multiple numbers on your account and to have a local dialling code that bears little resemblance to where you are actually located. This means a business servicing Glasgow, Leeds and Luton can have a local number that comes through to the same place for each of these locations.
3. Portability
By taking your adapter with you when you travel you can effectively take your office phone with you. Wherever you are in the world as long as you have a broadband connection and a phone your customers can call your office and you can speak to them as if you were in the office. If you are moving premises it has likewise never been easier to take your phone numbers with you.
4. Visual voicemail
VoIP services often offer – free of charge – the sort of advanced features that traditional phone services charge for. For example, visual voicemail, which gives you emailed transcripts of voice messages. Forget cradling the receiver and scribbling it down, because your VoIP secretary has written the message down already.
5. Call hunt
If you are out and about your VoIP technology can track you down by trying other phones sequentially or simultaneously until you are found. So you need never miss an important call again.
6. Call display
You can take control of your phone by seeing the number or name of who is calling you before you answer the phone.
7. Call waiting
Another free service offered is call waiting allowing you to switch between calls and, with call display, see who is trying to reach you.
8. Predictable and dependable
With crystal clear phone lines connecting them anywhere in the world many businesses already rely on VoIP technology to enhance their telephone service and reduce their costs. Such businesses have taken control of their phone rather than falling prey to fluctuating phone bills.
VoIP service providers like Vonage (http://www.vonage.co.uk) offer anytime call packages to landlines around the world, as well as to many mobiles. This helps businesses to know exactly how much your business telephone lines will cost, so it is hello to savings and goodbye to nasty phone bill shocks.