Not a small part of business costs goes to telephone bills, especially if analog telephony is used. For small, medium-sized enterprises, these costs make it harder to operate a business. IP telephony is an alternative solution. You can reach an equilibrium: get enough channels for customer and team communication, and lower phone bills.
What Company’s Telephone Expenses Consist Of?
To provide telephone communication to the office, an entrepreneur has a choice: to use analog telephony or switch to digital. To find out, which method is more cost-effective, let's look into typical bills a business has to pay:
- Connection and maintenance of telephone lines, including the costs of long-distance or international calls for communicating with branches, customers, partners;
- Plan which includes per-minute rates, limits, monthly subscription fee;
- Additional costs for call forwarding, hold time;
- Internet connection;
- Technical costs (for renting or buying telephones, the connection of telephone lines and servers, PBX, expenditures for software update);
- Payment for PBX configuration services of a technician.
Using local telephone systems with the emergence of IP telephony becomes less justifiable. If small businesses sometimes can do with a cellphone, then medium and large-sized enterprises have to choose a flexible service option. With VoIP telephony, a business will be enabled with a high-quality connection without geographical ties, which will allow reducing telephone costs by 20-50%.
How Adopting VoIP Technology Will Reduce Corporate Telephone Bills
If you're using analog telephony, then if you change the office location it will require relaying the telephone cables, setting up the hardware again. It will not allow you quickly reconfigure the operations of your enterprise when it's needed. But with cloud telephony, a company can even forego a physical location - employees complete tasks from home, coworking spaces, and all the while they're connected to a corporate telephone network based on a virtual number and IP PBX.
Using IP telephony will allow saving the most part of the company's budget. Structure of the costs for VoIP services:
- one-time fee for a virtual number setup;
- a monthly fee (or a subscription for several months, which goes with a discount);
- connection of a virtual PBX;
- incoming call forwarding to SIP (for most countries, it's free of charge);
- outgoing calls charged per minute;
- Internet connection costs;
- configuration of additional services for a virtual number (as needed).
IP telephony allows you to substantially circumvent technical costs. A company doesn't need to buy phone hardware - the employees will use their work computers for calls, with free downloaded apps (softphones). Virtual PBX works as a web app, and all costs for server maintenance and PBX are taken care of by the IP telephony provider, not by the entrepreneur.
Benefits of IP Telephony for Business
VoIP services are a good investment of the budget for small and mid-sized enterprises, just as well as large businesses with a branch network in various countries.
Optimal conditions for business operations are available for the users of IP telephony:
- Cheap calls within the region and to other countries;
- Clear cost structure. You know exactly how much you spend on calls thanks to statistics;
- Accessibility. Your employees could process customer calls, communicate with colleagues, use virtual PBX features from any place;
- Remote setup. Numbers and other services are set up online;
- Lack of territorial belonging. Even during business trips, the manager can use corporate telephony;
- Tracking agent productivity with statistics and call recordings.
With IP telephony you have a clear structure of expenditure and the ability to scale the telephone system as your business grows.
How to Set Up VoIP?
To cut the telephone bills costs and switch to the modern digital connection, determine the needs of your company. The Freezvon website has many types of virtual numbers available: landlines, mobiles, multichannel toll-free numbers. Numbers for fax and SMS are in popular demand as well.
For companies with a small number of users, one number with chosen additional services (voicemail, IVR, website widgets, etc.) could be enough. But we recommend using virtual PBX. With it, you will have more lines available, as well as an easy-to-configure greeting message, the use of conference calls, and other useful tools for corporate communications.
Speak to Freezvon VoIP expert for assistance in choosing the best set of IP telephony services, so that the solution met your price and feature expectations.