Disruptive innovation is a continuum. We as a species have an unrelenting appetite for developing improved technologies. From our ancient ancestors inventing crude hunting spears, to the wheel, to the infamous assembly line that produced Henry Ford’s Model T, new technologies have disrupted and replaced the old by offering significant benefits to users.
In the world of communications, VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) has been a disruptive technology, revolutionising the industry for some time. VoIP uses your existing internet connection to power your phone calls in place of traditional analogue phone systems.
The benefits for your business that this technology allows are substantial. The improvement in speed and availability of broadband has enabled businesses to take advantage of these benefits by making the switch to VoIP from analogue phone systems.
So what are these benefits?
The Bottom Line
Money makes the world go ‘round, or that’s what they say. Price is a determining factor for many businesses, admittedly it matters to some less than others but VoIP can save the majority of organisations money.
How?
Historically, traditional phone systems have come with the cost of line rental for the physical phone lines that are used to provide you with the service.
As VoIP doesn’t rely on phone lines because it is powered using your existing internet connection, these costs no longer need to appear on your business’ monthly bill.
Furthermore, initial investment in a traditional phone system could be expensive. Depending on the size of your business, one or more phones lines may have been required to provide the desired service. After that, the physical system itself would have needed installing with costs for the hardware and installation work itself.
With VoIP, setup costs are greatly decreased. At the most basic level, all you need is a office telephone and an internet connection to get started with making and receiving calls.
Flexibility
Today’s business environment requires flexibility. Remote working, periods out of office, and mobile technology have fundamentally changed how business is done on a day to day basis. Communication is of fundamental importance in business, so the changing environment has altered the requirements organisations have for their communications service.
As VoIP is powered via the internet, configuring your communications can be done online, generally through an administrative control panel.
Do you want to redirect calls to your mobile while you are out of office for the afternoon? You can do it in seconds. Need to reassign phone numbers to other employees? You can easily take care of it yourself. Want to get your voicemails from your mobile and your landline in one place? No problem.
This type of flexibility is the bread and butter of what VoIP can offer any kind of business. Due to its inherent flexibility owing to less reliance on physical hardware, a VoIP communications service also has more room for highly customised setups if a certain type of business required such.
Another major benefit on the flexibility front is the enablement of remote working. Whether you want to take your physical phone with you to work from another location and simply use the internet connection there, use a soft phone, or set up a redirect you can choose the option that is best for you.
Scalability
Hopefully, your business is growing and you need more phones for your expanding team. If that’s the case, or if you just want to consolidate your existing telecoms, VoIP allows businesses to easily scale their communications.
The capacity of traditional analogue phone systems for phone numbers and users was reliant on the physical hardware of the system. If the number of phones that you needed jumped above what your hardware was capable of, you either had to upgrade your existing system, or install a new one. Never mind the expense of this undertaking, it almost assuredly meant that new members to your team would be without a direct phone number for a period of time.
On the other hand if your organisation was consolidating, it may have been the case you were then stuck paying for something that was now surplus to requirements.
With VoIP, as long as your internet connection is powerful enough to support additional users, all you have to do is get the additional phones you need, with no systems installations required. This is because your phone system, known as an IP PBX is hosted in the cloud by your service provider.
Businesses in today’s environment looking to scale should not be worried about something as essential to their day to day operation as the ability of their employees to make phone calls. There is plenty of other hard work to be done. Getting the necessary phone numbers and handsets set up for people so that they can do their job should be easy. With VoIP, it really is easy.
Today, businesses expect more from the services they avail of. It would be reasonable to argue that from banking to internet service providers, the benefits, range of features and level of service being offered to businesses are improving.
The driving force behind this is the continued development of disruptive technologies. If your business expects more from your communications, VoIP can provide real, tangible benefits.
