Hosted VoIP: Leveling the Playing Field for the Small Business

Historically, a small business could not get access to sophisticated phone systems used by larger competitors. That is no longer the case, due to the emergence of a new breed of hosted voip service providers.

Hosted voip services are relatively inexpensive and deliver a pretty comprehensive set of traditional phone system features including auto-attendant, voicemail, extension dialing, directories, groups and even acd queues.

Using a hosted voip service has many great benefits for a small business of, let’s say, 25 people.

Dramatically reduced capital expenses for telecommunications
For a business of 25 people, in most cases, a $100,000 price tag for a sophisticated phone system is just not possible. Historically, if you were small, but wanted to sound as professional as your largest competitor when customers called, you needed to shell out a huge amount of money for a phone system. With hosted voip, you simply buy phones and connect to a completely managed service over existing Internet connections.

Lower total cost of ownership
Most small businesses cannot justify the ongoing expense of managing, upgrading and supporting an in-house phone system. Hosted voip allows you to rely on a 24x7 dedicated team which manages the service on your behalf. Upgrades, patches, new features, etc. are deployed without any service interruption and without any additional cost to you, the business customer.

Geographic Independence
Because the service is reached via the Internet, it doesn’t really matter where phones are located. They can all be in a single office, or they can be dispersed throughout remote locations, home offices, etc. As long as the phones are connected to the Internet, they will act exactly as if they were in the next cubicle in the office. You may be at your vacation condo in Vail but your boss can reach you from his New York office by dialing your 4-digit extension. Maybe not so ideal for some!

Flexibility
To deploy a hosted voip solution, you don’t need to wait for a crew of hardware and service installers. What used to take the proprietary PBX vendor and the telephone company weeks or even months, can be accomplished in days with hosted voip. There are no special phone lines to install. You simply buy readily available IP phones and plug them into your LAN, just like any other computer on the network. At home, simply plug the phone into your router. Moves, Adds and Changes used to be big money makers for telecom consultants. Today, it’s as easy as connecting to a new wifi network at Starbucks.

Greater contact with customers and stakeholders
Typically, hosted voip solutions include some great mobility features, which will allow your team to remain totally in touch with one another and with key stakeholders. For instance, a pretty standard feature with hosted voip is the ability to route your voicemail messages as .wav files to your email inbox. With smart phones, blackberries and iPhones in just about everyone’ s pockets these days, your team will respond quicker to the needs of colleagues and customers.

It’s fair to say that today, hosted voip is leveling the playing field for the small business. Hosted voip services are inexpensive, capital un-intensive, feature reach and really flexible.

OnSIP is an award winning hosted voip service with a one month free trial.

hosted voip
hosted voip