Hosted voice services are the next generation of telephony - packed full of features that can bring your phone system in line with the rest of your IT network.
Where traditional phone systems operated either in part, or entirely, through copper wires, a hosted voice service relies on nothing but your existing IT structure.
What is Hosted Voice
So, essentially, hosted voice is a cloud-based solution to telephony - and with enterprise internet speeds increasing all the time, it's becoming more and more attractive for businesses of all sizes.
We'll take a look at what hosted voice can offer - and why.
Ease of installation and management
When you think about maintaining, expanding or repairing traditional telephony infrastructure, the first thing you're likely to consider is the disruption of having an engineer on-site. Telephony has always been hands-on - but hosted voice services change this entirely.
Since hosted voice services are delivered through your internet circuit, management can generally be done remotely - and even installation requires a only very small amount of physical work.
While the avoiding the upheaval of set-up is a bonus - the on-going business benefits involved with being able to manage your phone system from an online portal are immeasurable.
Need to scale your operation quickly? Want to add a site? Need to reshuffle call routing? No problem - which is more than can be said for older-style systems.
If telephony has been a headache, moving to an entirely hosted option is likely to be an incredible painkiller - especially if you're working with a hosted voice managed service provider who understands your business needs and is willing to work proactively to make sure your system fits.
Security
Talking about portals, third-party companies, and off-site storage is likely to raise a few concerns with the most security conscious business owners or decision makers - but with hosted voice, it doesn't have to.
In reality, keeping IT services on-site might feel more secure - but passing your most mission critical infrastructure to professional providers is likely to be a significant step up in security.
Around 70% of small business will experience a data breach in the next 12 months. Small businesses are prime targets for cyber-criminals - simply because they think they're not. While the pickings might not be quite as rich when your small business is attacked - the attack is generally much more easily staged.
On average, downtime costs small businesses in the region of £10,000 per lost hour - and if an attack takes your phones offline, that figure could start multiplying very quickly. Rather than keeping traditional of hybrid systems on-site, relying on a dedicated hosted voice service - with its robust security and uptime guarantees - you're removing any element of chance from your business operation.
Cost
Increases in convenience, function, and security all sound like benefits that are listed before you're presented with a huge price tag - but with hosted voice services, this isn't the case.
Generally, small businesses will save somewhere in the region of 40-50% of their current telephony costs when switching to a hosted voice alternative. A big part of the reason behind this is the simplicity of the infrastructure needed.
While installing a physical network isn't without cost - it's something that most businesses will already have in place - meaning there's none of the additional cost you'd expect with telecoms engineers have previously had to come to your site.
Of course, cost isn't just about capital expenditure - but the good news is, operation costs of hosted voice systems are usually much more predictable too - especially if you're working with an experienced company who'll help you anticipate the services you may require as you grow.
Flexibility
Your business is unique - and has a unique set of requirements and ways of operating - and this makes hosted voice a perfect, flexible fit.
Phone systems have traditionally been extremely inflexible. Copper-based technology allows for dialling, re-dialing, voicemail, some internal routing - but not a great deal else. Include some VoIP services in a hybrid system and your functionality is upped - but still tied to some very real limits of how the technologies gel together.
With hosted voice services, you're unlocking a world of features that will often expand the vision of what's possible for a business - including:
- Remote management
- Integration of other communications applications
- Auto-call routing and distribution
- Voice recognition systems
- CRM integration
- Voice to text conversation transcription
Productivity
We've learned to work around the limitations of phone systems - and in many cases, they've defined that way we structure businesses and job roles.
With hosted voice technology, you may decide to automate syncing between your mission critical applications and phone systems - unlocking a world of possibilities before your customer has even connected with one of your end-users.
That said, if your processes are weighted toward post-call work, you may decide to employ a voice-to-text system that automatically transcribes your conversations and uploads them to your CRM apps.
Android productivity apps
The phone represents a lot of work for modern businesses - when you can make it work on your terms, you can completely re-imagine the amount of time it consumes - freeing up effort for your team to apply elsewhere, or simply reducing the need for quite so many people using the phone each day.
Customer service
Automation sounds like a one of the ingredients needed for a customer service nightmare - but in actual fact, customers like dialing in to companies who are using hosted voice to its full potential.
The reason is quite simple. Would you rather be interacting with a system - paying bills, accessing voice support or being directed to the most appropriate team? Or would you simply prefer to sit on hold and wait for a human?
Choose right customer service app
Overwhelmingly, customers prefer to get involved with your business as soon as possible - even if that means explaining their issue to a machine or listening to some automated information before they choose a course of action. Where traditional systems just kept people waiting - hosted voice services are increasingly being used to handle your customer experience entirely - before one of your end-users even needs to say 'hello'.
If you still have any question, feel free to ask me via comments.
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