Have You Made The Switch? - Clariion EMC | EMC consultant | DMX symmetrix maintenance

The telephone is the most commonly owned appliance globally and arguably one of the most important tools in your office for driving new and existing business. Even with the dramatic impact of emails, social media and search engine optimisation on businesses they all lack the human element accomplished even by the shortest of telephone calls.

With the rapid growth of the internet and increasing internet speeds more and more people are turning to the internet to reduce costs and assist with telephone lines under the system known as VOIP (Voice over IP). The benefits of running the phone system through the internet are numerous and can be fully customisable to your company’s requirements.

Traditionally businesses had to purchase an expensive BT infrastructure equipment in order to facilitate an increasing amount of telephone lines to run concurrently, with VOIP you can have the same amount of concurrent calls all operating over the internet without paying for the infrastructure huge amount of money. In addition a great feature offered by IP-PBX is that you can set up your telephone system to link with your Smartphone or set up a telephone extension for an individual working from home. As the calls are being made through the internet an internet connection is all one needs to connect to the office phone system, therefore one can link multiple branches of the same business benefiting from free internal calls. In addition everyone in the office or working from home can have their own direct dial number and can even customise their caller ID to any geographical area code in the world for both incoming and outgoing calls. Calls can be monitored and voicemail messages can be stored or emailed to an email address of your choice. With a VOIP system you can setup your telephone with a standard IVR (press 1 for sales , 2 for Accounts etc) and choose the music customers listen to as they held in the queue to be connected or are placed on hold. The telephone system can provide pre recorded information through the auto attendant freeing up human resources in your office. Lastly an easily accessible log is available for every call made and received to the line.

The above VOIP system can function in two ways; firstly it can run in conjunction with the existing BT infrastructure . The benefits of such a system are that you can retain your current office number and you can still use the BT infrastructure. However you will still have to pay extensive line rental fees. The next level up is to have your telephone system totally internet based, where it would be hosted in a secure location remotely. The benefit of this system is you no longer have to pay BT line rental fee. This is also a key factor in a DRP (disaster recovery plan) as the phone system is stored in a virtual cloud it can be accessed from any internet connection. An individual call package can be designed for your business depending on the way your phone is used in your business. All users can be set up throughout the world to connect to the phone system providing they have an internet connection removing the cost of high phone bills for workers travelling abroad. The overall investment in this new system will pay for itself within a year owing to the drastic costs saved in line rental, BT maintenance costs and expensive BT call charges. It is recommend that users of VOIP phone system purchase a G729 licence which drastically improves the call quality to near perfect when their calls are through VOIP lines or when there is a remote extension that connects to the telephone system via the internet.

These are benefits that until recently could only be enjoyed by large corporations however can now be offered across the board to all at an affordable price. The question therefore has to be asked ‘Have you made the switch?’