Communication is essential for any company to operate properly. Even if you were somehow capable of running a business on your own, you would still need to contact your customers or clients in some form. Telephony has been the best means of direct, real-time communication since it was first invented – known then as analogue or plain old telephone service. Whether you still use this or have upgraded to more modern systems (digital or IP telephony) it has become an established part of every business. Below is a list of characteristics of IP telephony that have made it a staple of every household and business.
Benefits of IP telephony
Unified communication
We’re all so used to the idea of everything in our lives being instantaneous, particularly in business. We expect fast communication to be a natural fit when dealing with any organisation and when it doesn’t happen, clients will either get frustrated or move on to another company that can help them faster!
Unified Communication is for any modern business – large, medium or small. It offers a wide range of tools, including desk and mobile phones, email, instant messaging, voicemail, presence information and audio, video and web conferencing.
When these tools are brought together to form a system that provides easy communication among a wide range of devices, it’s called unified communications (UC). We will be delving in to UC in much more detail in future blogs, so stay tuned.
Personally tailored
Your voice solutions system comes with a lot of features and services that can be adjusted to fit the needs of your company. Does your company hold multiple meetings, have staff in different locations and out on the road, need more people to be accessible via mobile and share documents with a number of different departments? These are just some of the issues that some businesses face.
The benefits of telephony these days is there are so many features you can add to your platform, communication can now be as flexible in your business as fast as the world changes. Not only that, now you can scale and grow with your communication platform at the pace and level of technology you need. Gone are the days of systems that had limited features and you felt like you were sticking a square peg in a round hole.
Growing technology
The above two points are just a small glimpse of what IP telephony has to offer. The latest innovation in telephony, VOIP solutions, is still just the tip of the iceberg, as more research and development hours are put into this field. Marvels are being tested and invented as you read this article. If you were to look at the history of telephony, you would notice that each disruption in the timeline produced innovations that provide faster and clearer communication. There is no doubt that IP telephony is well worth the investment, as its sights are constantly set on the future.
In the Cloud
We are now no longer restricted to setting up communications infrastructure on premise. Cloud communications deliver voice & data communications, applications and services, hosted on servers that the providers own and maintain, giving their customers access to the “cloud.” The main benefit of this solution is that customers only pay for services or applications they use and they have a more cost-effective, reliable and secure communications environment.
Companies can cut costs with cloud communications services without sacrificing features. Voice services delivered from the cloud increases the value of hosted telephony, as users can equally well turn to a cloud-based offering instead of relying on a facilities-based service provider for hosted VoIP. This expands their options beyond local or regional offerings.
Consistent support
All the above positives are coupled with the fact that you can now have a dedicated support team, ready to solve your problems and answer any question. These are experts who know the ins and outs of telephony, and can have your system running in a flash. They will lend some much-needed support as you install, maintain, and upgrade your system – all of this while minimising your service downtime and technological errors with efficient management and proactive action. And they don’t even need to be one site!
As communication evolves to fit the needs of business and society, so does telephony. Innovating for better communication will always be the goal.
