4 Key Benefits of VoIP for Business

Today, we’re going to look at the 4 major benefits of VoIP for business.

VoIP has been around since the inception of the Internet. However, it didn’t become an option for wide-scale use until the cost of broadband Internet decreased. While the market has experience about 20% growth for the last several years, myths about reduced call quality and myths about lower reliability versus landline service concern people.

Much of the call quality and reliability issues had to do more with bandwidth than the technology itself. We once had an office manager for a potential client say that she would not consider VoIP because they’d be dead in the water if their Internet went down. “How many times per year does your Internet go down?” we asked. She stated the last time it went down was 10 years ago!

“How about your power? How often does that go out?” we asked. She said she wasn’t worried about that because of their battery backup system, but the Internet going out concerned her. We get it; the business didn’t have a backup for an Internet outage.

It’s too bad because VoIP offers businesses supreme flexibility, cost savings, and more features than landlines. We’re going to show you how and why. By the end of this article, you’ll see why VoIP is the way to go.

But First: A Few Facts About VoIP and Internet Traffic

We understand the concerns, but technology has changed so much. For those who understand how broadband Internet works, feel free to skip this section.

Compare Internet bandwidth to lanes on a highway. Dial up was like a dirt road. ISDN, DSL and T1 lines were like small two lane highways. We currently have high speed broadband in many areas that’s like a freeway with several lanes for each direction.

Gigabit Internet is just now rolling out which adds lanes to each freeway direction. Soon, we’ll have stupid-fast Internet which will feel like having a lane all to yourself. The more Internet bandwidth, the better VoIP works.

For the previously mentioned office manager, we recommended a 4G LTE Internet auto-failover solution. It senses when the main Internet goes out, and automatically activates. Most Internet users would at worst experience a short delay, even on VoIP calls.

Still, she wasn’t convinced, even when we offered a free trial. Sometimes, people fear what they don’t understand.

Fun fact: all calls — landline calls, VoIP calls, smartphone calls — all travel through the same cables with other Internet traffic at some point. The final connecting run may be a cell phone tower, a fiber optic run, or down a little wire strung up on a telephone pole.

Benefits of VoIP for Business: 1. Cost Savings

The perception that less expensive means crappy still affects VoIP’s reputation. The opposite is actually true. Spending more on VoIP itself won’t increase its quality. However, spending more in these areas help: bandwidth, hardware, and technicians to support it.

Landlines still need all that physical infrastructure built in the mid-20th century spread out everywhere. Maintaining that infrastructure requires manpower, which increases overhead. Since VoIP is software-based, it requires pennies on the dollar to maintain versus landlines.

2. Flexibility & Features

Also, physical hardware means landlines can’t be reprogrammed with new features without adding more hardware — super expensive. With software-based VoIP, adding features means simply writing more code.

This makes VoIP highly customizable, and it can be easily integrated with other software. For example, many companies pull call data into their CRM. They can track numbers, length of employee conversations, etc. This additional data helps them serve their customers better.

Companies can also avoid bundles that Internet providers put together, along with long term contracts.

3. High Reliability

Looking back at the office manager who shot us down, we may not have done a good enough job on showing the benefits of VoIP. One thing we can address now is VoIP’s reliability.

It is dependent on the reliability of the resident Internet connection. Again, spending extra money on a solid Internet connection will not only help VoIP’s reliability, but will help the business as a whole. Investing in redundant Internet connections would also go a long way towards solving this problem.

Having a 4G LTE Internet failover solution also helps. This would increase Internet uptime. Over time, Internet failover pays for itself by decreasing the amount of hours of employee downtime.

4. Increases the bottom line

The first three benefits create a cumulative effect on cost savings. The abundance of features means that landline phone companies can no longer nickel and dime businesses to add extra features. High reliability also saves costs by keeping employees productive.

The flexibility of VoIP means businesses can acquire more metrics on their customers. More metrics means better ways to get and keep customers, which increases revenue.

Recap

This is why every Fortune 500 company uses VoIP: high reliability, abundance of features, cost savings, and flexibility. VoIP is a technology that every business can and should benefit from.