Your business banking has moved online, and your accounts package, so has your customer service, but what about your telephony? Have you moved your phone lines online too?

The flexibility, time-saving, cost and feature-rich nature of moving to the cloud extends to telephony too, and it’s the reason businesses are turning to voice over internet protocol (VoIP) systems. Also because it makes office telephony work for work-from-home setups.

Two aspects of cloud-based telephony make a lot of sense for business in general: cost and feature-richness. Let’s look at each of these benefits in more detail:

Cost

The running costs of VoIP systems tend to be lower than for landlines, for a few reasons:

• Setup costs are lower because they’re software-based and don’t require a technician
• Calls cost less because they use your existing internet line
• Hardware installation costs less because you don’t need cables and extensions
• Installation is quicker because you don’t have to wait for wiring to be installed
• International calls are free because they run through the internet
• Maintenance and management is done at source by the cloud provider so you don’t need IT support
• There are no penalties for ending a contract early because there are no long-term contracts

Feature richness

Because VoIP is software-based, there are many features available, some of which are either unavailable or too expensive to justify on landline systems. Here are some of them:

• Your employees needn’t be at the office to make and receive calls on your office number
• You can add more employees/extensions to the VoIP system whenever necessary
• The system includes anonymous call rejection, call routing, call forwarding and call notify
• The system includes business analytics such as monitoring and call tracking
• You can activate voicemail to email transcription and call recording
• VoIP can integrate with your cellphone so that calls to or from your office number come through to it
• The system is completely mobile if you were to move office

Lesser-known benefits

• You can adapt traditional phones to a VoIP network
• You can be anywhere to make or receive an office call
• Technical issues are fixed remotely via a web-based administration

It may be hard to believe that VoIP could be a low-cost alternative to traditional landlines, but that’s the beauty of technology.

Remember a time when international calls cost a fortune? Who would’ve thought we’d be calling anywhere in the world over an internet connection one day. And who would’ve thought business telephony could become cheaper than it was 10 years ago?

Now that internet speeds have caught up with VoIP technology, cloud telephony makes economic sense.