About The Author
Michelle Patterson is excited with
the new technologies that are threatening to change the way we stay in touch
and communicate, particular in business. She works with companies that are
introducing these technologies to make understanding them easy for regular
people.
Cost savings are
one of the major benefits that a hosted phone system offers over an in-house
phone system. Especially in today's competitive VoIP market, that can count for
a lot. The modern SMB has to stay lean and agile, so odds are the advantages of
walking away from the obsolete legacy PBX equipment that will by now be too
impractical to maintain should be quite evident. A hosted phone system provides
a plethora or additional features typically either not available with legacy PBX
systems, or too costly to implement, such as Computer Telephony Integration,
Messaging, Unified Communications, Upgraded Voice Mail Services, and Mobility.
Ultimately, this makes the hosted solution a compelling option.
Cost Savings
But of course the cost
savings are paramount. IP based systems are the latest generation in
communications technology, therefore they can offer a greater savings in price.
This is due to leaps ahead in manufacturing methods, improved design, and more
intelligent products. They also improve your bottom line in the following ways:
• They
help you to make better management decisions by simplifying billing and
assisting you to evaluate call patterns
- • Profile or restrict access to local or long-distance calls
- • Automatically route calls to the least expensive carrier
- • Harness the power of VoIP to curtail long-distance charges
- • Smoothly connect to your choice of a large number of high-speed digital services
Additionally,
because it's more efficient and cheaper to communicate by using a hosted VoIP
solution, your enterprise's productivity will increase, and you'll enjoy better
customer service with better and more frequent communications.
Computer Telephony Integration
CTI is a specific
technology that enables interactive connections between a telephone and a
computer to be made in an integrative fashion. This started with "screen
pop" technology, where an agent could see all the data held in a company's
database about a caller before they answered the phone. Now CTI includes such
components as the following:
- • Web-enabled callbacks
- • Voice recognition
- • Voice storage and forwarding
- • Voice Broadcasting, or a service for playing recorded messages
- • Text to Speech
- • Predictive Dialing
- • IVR - Interactive Voice Response
- • Internet Telephony
- • Computer based fax
- • Call Control
- • ACD - Automatic call distribution phone systems
Messaging
VoIP allows many
kinds of messaging within a rich context. You can immediately switch between
text messaging, instant messaging, voice messaging and video messaging, given
the right hardware and protocols on your devices. Although there may be some
overlap between these threads of communication, the next benefit will tie it
all together so it's all unified.
UC (Unified Communications)
Unified
Communications seems to be the way that
many enterprises are taking their communications these days. It's an easy way
to integrate many real-time communication services under one roof, like
presence information (are you there? Are you busy?), instant messaging,
telephony, desktop sharing, video conferencing, data sharing, speech
recognition and call control with other communication services that are
non-real-time, such as email, fax and SMS. UC isn't a single product, but a
group of products that gives the user a consistent interface, regardless of
device or media type.
Voice Mail Services
VoIP has improved
on the old standard we've had since the "old days" of telephony. You
can hear your voicemail from any phone connected to the network, for instance,
or you can have it forwarded to your email after it's been converted to text.
You can also change your settings from a web browser, instead of the clunky
phone menu we've all had to get used to.
Mobility
VoIP also enables
mobility, which can be defined as being able to use your VoIP service while
transiting from one location to another, and not disconnecting at all. Another
way of looking at it would be to enable your VoIP connection regardless of
where you are on your company's network, no matter what boundaries you might
cross, be they logical or physical.
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