Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) is one of the oldest business technologies in the market – yet, it hasn’t gone the way of the floppy disk and typewriters. At the inception, VOIP was too much of a hassle because it requires both parties on the call to be online on a computer. More so, the call quality on VOIP calls of old was poor with broken messages, rapid interruptions and loss of service – worst part is that those calls were expensive.
However, upgrades in the ISP infrastructure, improvement in data services and cheaper access to the Internet has provided a quantum leap in VOIP services in the last couple of years. In 2013, a market research report showed that there were more than 640 million VOIP subscribers worldwide. Now, the global VOIP services market is worth $73 billion, it is expected to be worth $136.76 billion by 2020 while adding an additional 348.5 million subscribers.
In essence, VOIP services are starting to occupy an important place in communications due to the upsurge in the use of residential and business VOIP services. Nonetheless, many business owners are still biased against using VOIP services.
Cheaper solution for making calls
Access to the Internet is now quite cheap and it is often offered as a complementary offer in many bundled package. VOIP providers find it much easier to piggyback on ISP services to scale their services; hence, VOIP providers typically do not incur steep operating costs that many traditional phone companies incur. If you already have an internet subscription for your business, you can easily start using VOIP services without having to incur additional charges to keep a separate phone line.
The fact that you don’t need to maintain separate lines for phone calls and data means your business will have lesser operating costs. Businesses with lesser operational costs tend to have more competitive advantages in their ability to pass down the savings to their customers. Hence, you’ll see an improvement in your bottom line due to the cost savings from VOIP.
Make calls anywhere
The second reason businesses should consider using VOIP for communications is the fact that it allows you to make and receive calls anywhere. With conventional phone systems, your ability to connect with team members, suppliers, and customers is limited to the availability of phone lines. However, with VOIP services, you can easily connect with persons of interest inasmuch as you are connected to broadband internet connection even if the people are in different locations and different countries.
In addition, VOIP makes it easy to connect with team members who are offsite or on the field. Video conferencing and other call centre applications also provide you with an opportunity to stay on top of your business operations.
User-friendly interfaces
Traditional business phone systems tend have some wonky phone switches but wonky phone switches are not quite as annoying an unintuitive user interfaces. You can imagine how it can be crazy to forward a call on a traditional phone system. More worrisome is the fact that those traditional phone systems have very poor customer support that could tire you out if you happen to forget the password to your voicemail or if you need tech support for the unending glitches.
VOIP service providers have systems that can be integrated into the web and mobile interfaces of businesses; hence, your employees don’t have to feel like that are traveling back in time to use wonky phone switches. VOIP communication systems can also be personalised to meet the need of individual users as opposed to traditional phone systems that mandates the use of one central setting. The best part is that VOIP communication can be adapted to meet diverse business needs with upgrades or downgrades to meet business needs per time.
