If there was one thing you could change about your small business heading into 2013, what would it be?
Better communication among employees and one’s customers is
oftentimes looked at as needing an upgrade. If you don’t communicate
properly around the office, your employees may not get their marching
orders. Fail to properly communicate with customers, and you could lose
some of them to the competition.
To more effectively communicate with both, are you considering adding
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) to your game plan in the New Year?
According to an Infonetics report, worldwide service provider revenue
from both businesses and residential/SOHO (small office/home office)
services accounted for close to $58 billion in 2011, an increase of 16
percent from 2010. Meantime, the number of seats for hosted business
VoIP and unified communication services are on pace to more than double
between now and 2016.
For those business owners not dialed-in to what VoIP can offer them, consider:
• Savings – What small business owner is not
interested in saving their company money? With VoIP, you not only save
on in-house calls (talking to employees who are traveling for you or
work remotely) compared to standard phone systems, but you also spend
less on communication hardware. If you run a sizable call center at your
business, you can see savings over time with all the phone traffic that
you are required to handle.
• Efficiency – Along with the monetary savings, VoIP
allows your small business to be more efficient, both among employees
and in dealing with customers. Voice and data needs can be satisfied
with a lone set of networks protocols and wiring, providing your team
with better functionality. If you have employees on the road for work or
telecommuting, you can dial-in to audio conferencing, with both
national and internationals calls doable from one PC to another or via a
PC to a landline.
• Hosted or Non-Hosted? - If you choose VoIP, you
must decide between a hosted or non-hosted system. With a hosted system,
an outside company handles all the placement and management of the
system. A non-hosted system involves in-house management. A hosted
system offers the opportunity for small business owners to get their
hands on more recent technology and features for a monthly rate for each
phone. In many cases, this will come with a PBX (private branch
exchange) phone system. The question oftentimes becomes, do you want
someone outside of your company having the responsibility and control
for the system? With non-hosted, you purchase the VoIP equipment and set
it up. While the initial expense for such a system is greater than that
of a hosted system, keep in mind that once paid off, you own the
equipment, essentially an investment for your business.
• Growing Business – Finally, VoIP can definitely
make sense if you plan to grow your small business in the years to come.
As you add more workers to the mix, you don’t need to pay for, and
deploy more phone lines in your office. Simply provide an extension and
hook it up to the current system to plug-in new lines. If you outgrow
your office space, you can simply keep the same business phone number
and take it with you because you are connected through the Internet, not
one phone line in the present office. Speaking of growing, one item you
need to have covered prior to choosing a VoIP system is your available
bandwidth. Do some testing beforehand to see if your present network
configuration can take on more traffic.
If 2013 is the year you give VoIP a try for your small business, you
could be dialed-in to better efficiency and more communications savings
over time.
Dave Thomas,
Post from: SiteProNews
Dial-In to Better Service for Your Small Business