It's understandable if someone were a bit suspicious about people proclaiming new technology to be the "next big thing." It seems to happen every week or two. However, sometimes paradigm shifts do happen. Now, after nearly a century of dominating business communications, the old copper wire system is finally becoming outdated, and there are new small business phone systems in place that you should be investigating instead.
Modern telecommunications offer advantages that simply would not have been possible ten years ago, and increasing numbers of businesses see that it's time to upgrade to keep up.
Four Reasons This Is The Year To Upgrade Your Small Business Phone Systems
Voice Over IP
VoIP technologies are the backbone of practically all modern telephone systems. Rather than using copper wire, phone calls are converted into data and sent over your Internet connection. There are numerous advantages to this, not the least being that long distance telephone calls become virtually free.
Worldwide communications are too important to businesses to be paying by the minute. If you choose a hosted VoIP provider, your phone service continues to be a monthly payment, but you'll see a drastic cut in your bills and, often, a boost in call quality!
Unified Messaging
Aside from the price benefits, moving towards VoIP telephone systems means you can implement truly unified messaging in your office. Whether the message is voice, text, data, or something else... every message can be routed to every employee, where ever they are, on any device.
Messages aren't missed. Barring some massive network failure, "I didn't get your email!" ceases to be a valid excuse, because you have confirmation it arrived. Workers on the other side of the world can still be kept in the loop on changes being made back home. Your telephone extensions can become consistent across every office.
Unified systems like this make communication seamless, so that the method of communicating simply doesn't matter.
Cloud Collaboration
Business telephone systems are about more than just voice today. The distributed nature of modern telecommunications means that voice or video communications can go on during collaborative projects.
Workers on assignment at a foreign destination, or attending a trade conference across the country, can continue to work as usual. The same data and telephone system will keep them in the loop, give them access to shared projects, as well as allowing them to communicate with each other the whole time.
It starts to make you wonder if you even still need an office!
Personal IVRs
IVR systems have traditionally been extremely difficult to set up, something that could only be done at a company-wide level. However, unified IP-based communications, along with advances in technology, make IVRs easy for virtually any worker to use.
Through a combination of simple scripting and voice synthesis technology, a worker going on assignment can create their own menu system that guides messages to them, backed up by a telephone messaging network that ensures the messages arrive. More options are available as well, with almost unlimited ability to route calls to any other message device.
This is just one more way that modern Internet phone systems empower your employees to do more, on their own, simply by giving them the tools to do so.
The World Is Changing...
Technology is advancing at a dizzying pace these days. After a couple decades of uncertainty, it's looking like we finally have a clear successor to the copper-wire telephone system, and it's Voice-over-IP.
It's understandable if it's been years since you've last upgraded your telephone systems, but now is the time to act. Let us know if we can do anything to help you bring your office up to 21st Century communications!
