In today’s cutthroat business world, communication plays a pivotal role to provide you with an edge over your rivals. Communication makes businesses become more productive. Telecommunication and traditional landline phones have been the choice of almost 68 percent of businesses around the world and they couldn’t be more delusional to shell out a hefty sum every month toward the bills. Modern business communication requires a cheap, reliable, and versatile mean of communication and landlines are an utter failure at that. It’s time to shift to the more reliable and cost-effective VoIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) that provides a unified communication system. If you’re new at your business or not, you’d still have questions arising the selection of the best VoIP for businesses in the market. We help solve your problem by guiding you toward choosing the right VoIP service provider for your business.
General features in a VoIP service provider you must look for
Unified communication
VoIP simply converts analog audio signals into digital signals that can be carried through the Internet. Hence, communication is a vital purpose of using VoIP for businesses. Years ago, VoIP was only associated with voice calls, but now it is linked with video calls, emails, and a dozen other features. Unified communication is the umbrella term for all these features under one. While looking to purchase a VoIP service provider for your business needs, flip the switch (pun intended) for the one that offers a unified communication through video, phone calls, video conferencing, voicemails, and emails. Using a VoIP service provider with unified communication is easier than opening multiple applications for different forms of communication.
Cost effectiveness and hidden costs
Just like every most other software available in the market, the more money you spend, the better the features you can get. Before deciding what plan to take, decide whether you want the free VoIP service provider with limited features or the paid software with excessive features. Before deciding on a VoIP service provider for your business, check whether the plans are flexible and suit your needs. For example, you might not require an international calling feature if you’re a small business, so choosing the cheapest plan for VoIP service provider would be smart. Also, make sure that apart from per minute or monthly charges, the additional costs are covered in the plan.
Verified credentials and reviews
Before jumping on the best VoIP service provider that you had heard about from a friend, do your own investigation. The first step in this would be to see and understand the type of online presence the service provider has. Look out for any fraud or fallacious activities that may have happened in the past and analyze them. Some other methods would be to check the after-sales FAQs that may give you a wider view of the services that are provided and whether they stand true to their word or not. Going a step further, do not hesitate to ask for reliable credentials and references from the vendor directly to be double-sure.
Call management and value added services for no extra cost
A reliable VoIP service provider will give you a video conferencing feature, but only the top-quality ones are equipped with a call management feature. The feature provides a user with multiple functions such as call waiting for service, call forwarding, and other salient call aspects. For every business to optimize its communication, features like these come in handy and should be a part of VoIP service. VoIP service providers should give some add-on benefits for no extra costs. These benefits should be add-ins like music on hold, expert greeting, TrueACD queuing, unlimited extensions, call queues, call analytics, call routing, call recording, softphones, and toll-free numbers. Apart from the cost-effectiveness, value-added service is a key factor in choosing a VoIP service provider as well.
Security
If you’re a business that has a more modern approach and all your data is based on the cloud, then you’re doing well. But what about the security of a new Internet-based communication technology that you’ll be attaching to your system? Is VoIP service safe to use? The answer is just a step away! Asking your vendor to include data security in the license agreement makes the VoIP provided to you more secure against breaches. While searching for an ideal VoIP service provider, watch out for the security rating of the product.
VoIP technological aspects to keep in mind
Understanding your VoIP service needs
Delve into the ocean of acronyms in VoIP and decide whether your business needs a Private Branch Exchange (PBX) or a Session Initiated Protocol (SIP) Trunk. Once, you know what type of VoIP is needed for your business, you’d know which product, plan or service to choose. There are three types of VoIP, namely: Private Branch Exchange (on-premise, hosted or a hybrid of both), Session Initiated Protocol Trunking (a communication protocol for controlling and managing multimedia communications) and Integrated Access (IP network doubles as a voice server).
Verifying bandwidth and smartphone compatibility
To maximize the quality of the end-user voice and sound quality, it’s necessary to focus on what bandwidth your business requires. Calculating Bandwidth is fairly difficult and requires the number of phone users in the office and the concurrent calls placed simultaneously by them. An easy way to figure out is to use your internet usage metrics. Once you’ve nailed the bandwidth required and the codec that you have to use, your IT team will know the right VoIP for your business communication needs.
Do you really need a VoIP service provider?
So, the big question pondering your mind is, do I need a VoIP service provider or not? We’d say that you’d make a grave mistake by not shifting to the latter. VoIP has helped many businesses in their endeavors, and we don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t help yours too. Not only do you improve the quality of the communications through video, emails, voice, and conference calls but also save a hefty sum of money by buying an integrated product that serves all your communication needs. We’re pretty sure that with all the suggestions we’ve given you, choosing the right product is within your grasp.
Featured image: Freerange Stock
Everybody is talking about business VOIP (cloud-communications) these days as it creating ripples in the industry of communication. In any case, a portion of the individuals is hesitant to overhaul their conventional telephone system to VoIP as they get acquainted with the innovations they grow up with.
In any case, to remain ahead in the present business market, organizations need to push ahead and get new and imaginative open doors that decrease the weight and expands profitability.