Is your small business choosing a new phone system? You’ve probably come across VoIP; it’s an excellent option for businesses of all sizes. In this blog post, we’ll be specifically discussing hosted VoIP, as this is the most popular option for smaller businesses.

In this blog post about VoIP for small businesses, here’s what we’ll be discussing.

• How VoIP works?
• What is hosted VoIP?
• The advantages of VoIP

How does VoIP work?

The name, voice over IP, is self-explanatory. The term Voice over Internet Protocol encompasses a range of technologies that enable you to make calls over the internet rather than the traditional PSTN.

There are numerous advantages of VoIP, such as:

• Economical
• Advanced features available as standard
• A mobile solution

We’ll discuss these advantages and others more later in the blog post.

VoIP works by taking your analogue voice signals, converting them into digital signals, and sending them as data packets over your broadband line.

It’s similar to sending a file over the internet. Only this time, the file is the digitised voice signals.

Next, let’s take a closer look at hosted VoIP in particular.

What is hosted VoIP?

In basic terms, a hosted VoIP platform is a cloud-based telephone system that you will use to make calls over the internet.

Instead of having any telephone system hardware in your office as you’d have with a traditional setup, your system is actually entirely in the cloud.

Your service provider hosts your phone system in a private data centre and maintains it for you.

For bigger operations, you might have an on-premises VoIP telephone system. This is where you have your own servers onsite and maintain your own VoIP system.

With hosted VoIP, you have a VoIP provider that looks after your system in private data centres.

With the power of broadband, you’ll be able to access your telephone system and use its full functionality without any hardware in your office.

The advantages of VoIP

Hosted VoIP solutions are flexible and low-maintenance, as well as future-proof. An unreliable phone system can be very expensive, but you can’t go wrong with hosted VoIP; it’s a solution that can mould to any business.

Here are 5 key benefits of hosted telephony:

• Scalable
• Inexpensive
• Reliable
• Enhanced Call Management
• Free Updates Forever

Hosted VoIP is a low-cost solution with plenty of benefits, from unparalleled scalability to unrivalled reliability. Here’s some further insight into the 5 benefits that we’ve listed above.

Scalable

A traditional telephone system factually doesn’t scale with your business easily. Want to add a new line or make changes to your telephone system? Even the smallest of changes can take weeks, and you can guarantee that any changes come with big expense.

Adding lines to and modifying hosted VoIP solutions is completely different: Adding new lines to your system requires a simple modification in the cloud portal.

You can make changes easily, quickly and at no cost through an uncomplicated interface. No telephony experience? You can modify your telephone system irrespective of your experience with a little training.

You can scale your VoIP system up and down at any time, with a few modifications on a portal. Complete flexibility makes hosted VoIP the greatest telephony solution available.

Inexpensive

The upfront and ongoing costs of a hosted telephone system are cheaper than the costs of creating and maintaining a traditional system. VoIP pricing is completely transparent, so you know exactly what you’ll pay every month. This makes budgeting for the cost of your telephone system easy.

The provider of your cloud-hosted telephone system owns the hardware and infrastructure that keeps your system online.

There is no hardware on your premises, other than the IP handsets that allow you to make and receive calls. This means the upfront investment is small, as you simply pay for handset installation. Your monthly bill is made up of licences (AKA phone lines) and advanced features such as recording backup.

With VoIP, you only pay for what you need. There’s no need to invest in on-site hardware that you don’t make the most of. You simply have handsets and licences that you pay for monthly.

Licences are much cheaper than traditional phone lines. You’ll pay less for VoIP licences than you’re paying for your phone line.

A lot of businesses cannot afford to make a big upfront investment in hardware. With VoIP, you pay nothing upfront. You pay a fixed monthly bill that never changes, unless you need more handsets or licences throughout your contract.

Reliable

According to a recent survey, 75% of participants were either very satisfied or satisfied with their current hosted VoIP solution. This percentage is set to rise as providers make constant improvements at no extra charge to users.

Despite many satisfied businesses, other research shows that businesses delay switching to hosted telephony because of reliability concerns. Fortunately, reliability concerns are completely unsubstantiated.

Providers have been working for years to enhance their VoIP offerings, and VoIP is far more reliable than PSTN in 2021.

VoIP does depend on an internet connection. However, minimising the risk of a telephone system dependent on an internet connection is easier than ever.

As BT rolls out fibre connectivity to the entire country, reliability only increases. In fact, fibre cabling is much more reliable than copper lines, which are increasingly vulnerable to damage and complete failure.

It’s easy to differentiate between a poor VoIP provider and a reliable one. Good VoIP providers offer SLAs, guaranteed uptime and 24/7 support. All businesses want a guarantee when it comes to quality of service, which you’ll get with a good VoIP provider.

Enhanced Call Management

A cloud-hosted VoIP telephone system comes with a massive number of call management features. VoIP will enhance your business’s communication capabilities and increase the productivity and efficiency of your operation.

Here’s a small selection of call management features available at no additional cost:

• Call Forwarding
• Call Queue Groups
• Call Recording
• Call Transfer
• Hunt Groups
• Schedules
• Remote Office

These features are incredibly useful to all businesses. Some features, such as remote office, offer the flexibility that modern businesses need. Features such as call forwarding can become part of your business continuity plan. If your internet goes down, you can forward all calls to mobile devices or voicemail, ensuring you don’t miss important calls and communication.

To read more about VoIP call management features, please visit our dedicated page. We explain all the above features in greater detail, so please take a look.

Free Updates Forever

VoIP providers constantly upgrade their infrastructure and enhance their VoIP solutions with updates. However, you won’t have to pay for these updates; they will be available to all customers who have the provider’s VoIP solution.

Updating a traditional telephone system can incur significant cost. When you consider engineer visits and the need to purchase new hardware, your business will end up spending a fortune.

Providers host VoIP telephone systems in the cloud, so users have no onsite infrastructure. When providers update their infrastructure, there is no cost to users.

VoIP is future proof, which is the key reason to move over to a telephone system hosted in the cloud. The traditional telephone network is shutting down as you read this blog post. Providers will continue to enhance their VoIP offerings as every business moves over to a digital telephone system. Digital is the future – VoIP is completely future proof.