VoIP has slowly been climbing the ladder of prevalent technology in the last few years. But, it’s most impressive success can be found in the business sector. Buried under the billions of dollars and metric tons of paperwork, VoIP has been integrating into the work place at a breakneck speed, replacing the overly expensive, ridiculously inefficient dinosaur that is traditional phone service. For a major corporation or even just a small business, phone service is an expensive proposition. So is internet access. By combining the two, they are able to cut a great deal of intrinsic costs and so the most development and growth is likely to be found in the business sector.
There are a number of reasons why VoIP is a great choice for businesses, besides the obvious benefits of lowered costs and more convenient access. For those small businesses out there trying to figure out what direction to take, here’s a short list of what we think are the five most important features offered by VoIP for businesses.
Auto Attendant
Voice mail has been an essential feature of phone service for years now. Unfortunately, the date technology has been in need of a major overhaul for many of those years. With the highest quality VoIP phone service solutions out there, new extensions such as Auto Attendant are available to make the use of voicemail that much easier.
Auto Attendant itself is a method for breaking down your voice mail into trees that create different directories for departments, employees and existing extensions. Think of it as a phone version of Windows Explorer. It serves to digitally organize and store your voice mails. It makes routing and answering calls via central numbers incredibly easy as well. For companies that only have two or three people operating a dozen different departments, Auto Attendant options allow you to appear more professional and developed than you actually are by routing calls through to numbers by voice and phone commands.
FMFM (Find Me, Follow Me)
This is one of the most useful features for businesses as it allows an employee to be available at a given number or extension no matter where they move. FMFM will route calls to cell phones, hotel extensions and home phones depending on what you set it to do and allow business men to take calls from anywhere in the world at any time.
The feature will even allow you to establish an order of calling so as calls can ring through to a business desk, then a cell phone, then a home number, running through the motions until the employee answers the phone or it eventually goes to voicemail. Alternately, an employee can simply say where they will be and have calls ring through to a different number accordingly.
Presence
As an extension of the above described FMFM feature, Presence allows users to program in their user names and logins so that the system can actively track where and when a user is at work, at home or outside the phone, using their cellular phone. If an employee is logged into their email or possibly they have recently checked voice mail from their wireless; either way, it’s easy for Presence to track them down and send calls to their location.
Conference Calling
For the most part, phone systems support audio conferencing, but with the growth of technology, video conferencing is becoming infinitely more feasible and used. There can be numerous callers from different locations all linked via video conferencing over VoIP to each other for a meeting.
The beauty of VoIP is that during conference calls data transfer and presentations are easily accessed via the same network. It’s possible to send your files and access computers from cross country while talking cross country. The full integration of numerous forms of technology is best realized in this format. Often, separate software packages are required to take advantage of this functionality. Microsoft among other companies now makes a product that does just this.
Multi-Tasking and Technology Convergence
The world is multi-faceted and with the growth of IP technology, so too is communication integration. There are dozens of different functions utilized on a daily basis by businesses, including calls, e-mail, instant messaging, conferencing, faxing, and voice mail. All of these features can be handled by the same data network now, making it infinitely easier to integrate them into one service and bypass each other for maximum availability. With the ability to list a phone number, fax number, instant messenger name and e-mail address, it’s almost impossible to be completely out of touch with someone trying to contact you.
IP Technology and the Growth of Small Business
VoIP is a great price solution for larger businesses, but the technology it represents is nothing new to those massive corporate solutions that have been pumping for years. Instead, it’s the small businesses that gain the most from the effects of VoIP integration. The prices are as low as they’ve ever been and features are more rampant than ever before, allowing even the smallest of businesses to appear as though they have many more resources.
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