If you’re new to Hosted Voice, moving from a traditional telephone system can throw up a few differences. Identifying the key reasons that businesses adopt Hosted Voice is important in moving you through your journey. Here is a short summary of the reasons that businesses implement it.
Hosted Voice services offer many features that can be used to configure a voice service precisely around the needs of a business.
As a small subset, Hosted voice services include features such as:
Ultimately, you can’t build a business case without talking about costs. Hosted voice, like most cloud technologies, provides a saving from day one. Replacing traditional communications infrastructure with cloud consumption opens the door to a raft of savings. There are no ISDN lines to install and no on-site equipment required.
Ranging from free calls between sites (on-net calling) to the provision of SIP trunks and a Hosted Voice estate, your total cost of ownership is set to reduce dramatically.
Hosted Voice can help improve productivity. Hosted Voice services have intuitive interfaces that people find easy and quick to use. This reduces wasted time.
Hosted Voice services help people to avoid missing calls. Simple tools like “find me, follow me”, call diversion and overflow groups enable the phone to be answered every time. It also avoids potential customers from calling a competitor when they fail to reach someone in your business.
As you move further into Unified Comms, features like instant messaging, presence and virtual meetings join up real time communications with static communications. This puts a stop to things like calling when a user isn’t at their desk. You simply check if your colleague is available, busy or away.
Scenarios outside of your control can always occur. Be it an extreme event like an earthquake or a more common scenario like a power cut or treacherous weather, you need to be prepared.
It is no longer acceptable to be simply be able to react to these situations. Your business needs to have business continuity plans in place. Hosted voice gives you the power to either switch on at the time of the event or automatically trigger when thresholds are breached.
Here, calls are routed to a more appropriate destination, such as a remote office or switched to mobiles where your staff can easily access their calls.
As businesses grow, or when staff leave, security plays more and more of a pivotal role.
Cloud infrastructure takes care of the challenges and criticality of business communications. As priority, robust security technology and practices are in place to protect all customer information and assets. Typically, you can expect security frameworks such as ISO27001 and NIST 800-53 as standard.
Going one step further, deployment of Hosted Voice over network infrastructure provided by the same service provider enables enhanced monitoring and security. You should always take this into consideration when choosing a voice provider.
With growing businesses, it’s important to have a system that has no upper limit. As with most cloud technologies, Hosted Voice is provided as a consumption model. With no need for additional line cards or servers each time you add more users, voice will scale with your growth.
The same can be said for when you need to scale down. If you are a business with seasonal employees, like a retail call centre at Christmas, spinning up new users then reducing them down is a key factor in your communications strategy.
Hosted Voice is a pay as you grow model. Solutions are totally scalable thanks to the demand of “as-a-Service" consumption.
We often see multiple applications connected to a customer’s network. These can range from CRM applications like Salesforce to collaboration suites like Office 365 and Skype for Business.
Hosted Voice neatly tightens up the experience between communications tools and heavy use applications. Functionality such as screen popping and click to dial is standard out of the box.
Reporting on telephony goes a lot further than MOS (Mean Opinion Score). Simple things like call outbound and incoming call reports are included as standard. Here, you can expect granular detail of each call in and out of your business.
For the more complex scenarios, business decisions can be influenced and automated through trend analysis, graphical representation and deep dive analytics.
With an efficient network in place, and all your applications communicating with each other, it is imperative that the quality is assured. Hosted Voice combined with market leading handsets ensures crystal clear voice quality every call.
To ensure every call is operating at peak performance, call quality is proactively monitored and scored. Mean Opinion Scoring (MOS) allows you identify any calls that have dropped below certain thresholds. You can then dig deeper and troubleshoot to find the source of the problem.
As you introduce new staff, it’s crucial to get them up to speed as quickly as possible. How many times have you seen a new starter arrive, with no way of communicating with the outside world?
First impressions are everything. With any cloud phone system, you are looking at swift configuration for new users. This even extends to self-configuration, for super users with access to provisioning portals.
For new sites, the same experience can be expected. With infrastructure already existing in a service provider’s cloud, a new tenant can be provisioned in line with your deadlines. For new sites that need more than just Hosted Voice, we also provide Rapid Site Deployment for those that need instant internet access.
Now that you’ve got to grips with the benefits of Hosted Voice, it’s worth looking at how other businesses are moving to cloud technologies. View the next blog in the series here.
If you would like to find out more, then you may like to read one of our other blogs or downloads, or request a conversation with one of our consultants. We are always happy to discuss, without obligation.