Thanks to leaps in technology, traditional business functions have become easier to use, acquire and maintain. This means that services that previously cost a lot due to proprietary hardware and infrastructure required to support them are now much cheaper and accessible. Using your computers and the internet, you can provide all the needed hardware and software for internet-based telephony.
Essentially, the technology that actually lets people perform common business functions over the internet is called VoIP. VoIP stands for Voice over Internet Protocol, which entails the use of your computer as the hardware and software support for your telephony solutions. The internet serves as your telephone network, whether it’s between your own devices or every other phone.
Most phone service providers say that they can give you business phone numbers and other telephony solutions that function just like landline systems. But this is just to help people understand the basics of what VoIP-bases phones can do. When you think about it, they’re supposed to be able to do so much more since you have a PC and the internet at your disposal.
To help you understand how different VoIP-based business functions work, take a look at the following:
- You use phone accounts instead of actual phones. You’re given a software phone that basically looks like a dial pad on your screen that has various functions based on the type of phone system you acquired. You then login to the phone account you’re given and that’s the only time you can make and receive calls.Since you aren’t tied to a device, you can actually open your phone account from any device that has the right phone software. So your home PC, your smartphone or any laptop that has the phone software can be your VoIP phone.
- You can fax without a fax machine. But isn’t that just email? Well, if you can actually send documents to other fax machines or receive faxes sent from an actual fax machine, then you’re faxing, aren’t you? With an online fax application, you can send multiple faxes at the same time and receive several simultaneously. Your callers never have to worry about a busy line when they send you a fax.
- Your PBX isn’t limited to phones in a single physical area. That’s right, you can connect phones in different states to just one number. You can purchase a certain number of phone lines and just download software for each device you want under the PBX. Your branch in the East coast rings at the same time a call comes into the PBX in the West coast with virtually no extra long distance charges.
Check with your VoIP service provider what other business functions they can offer your company.