How can hosted voice benefit my small business?
Small businesses are increasingly turning to hosted voice for a cost effective, simple-to-adopt, and reliable company phone system.
Hosted voice, otherwise known as virtual PBX (private branch exchange), is a private phone system that’s hosted in the cloud and uses your internet connection to let users make, receive, and manage calls. Our post tells you more about what hosted voice is and how it works.
Here’s why it’s time for your SME to adopt hosted voice.
1. It’s cost effective
When you’re running a small business, keeping your overheads down is vital to help your business grow. For this reason, cloud-based hosted voice is a much more cost-effective option than an onsite PBX.
Hosted voice can save you plenty of money on the company phone bill. Calls are made through the cloud, meaning internal communications will be incredibly low cost.
As you can use any mobile phones, tablets, and computers you already own with hosted voice, you won’t necessarily have to buy a load of new hardware to get you and your employees connected to each other and the outside world.
2. Easy to adopt
The lack of need for new hardware and the ease with which you can integrate mobiles and other devices is part of what makes it easy to get hosted voice set up within your small business.
You can keep all your phone numbers the same, so your customers will easily be able to contact you after the switch, and you don’t need to bother with sending out new numbers to them.
As your hosted voice equipment is stored in the cloud and managed externally, you don’t need anyone on your payroll managing it.
3. Simple mobile integration
Using our twinning service, you can set up a mobile phone or another handset to act as though it’s a device within your small business.
All it takes is a few clicks and an app for you or your employees to have a smartphone connected into your hosted voice service. This should be much easier for your employees, as it lets them use a device that they already know well.
4. Secure and reliable
Cloud-based PBX should come with a layer of protection to keep your system secure. This could make hosted voice safer than a system you’d have on your company’s premises because it’s not down to you, or someone you employ, to keep on top of security best practice.
Hosted voice is also a reliable solution in the event of disasters, such as flooding, power cuts, and other technical issues – whatever happens to your premises doesn’t happen in the cloud. This can relieve a lot of stress for small business owners where even a small amount of downtime can have an enormous negative impact.
Furthermore, even if something were to go wrong at the source for your PBX, there’s usually a contingency plan to reroute your data and help you avoid any disruption.
5. Flexible and productive
You need to be prepared for growth when you’re running a small business, so it’s good to have a PBX that can be easily scaled up or down. Since your PBX is offered as a service, you can simply add more features to your subscription or take them away as and when you need to.
Hosted voice can also help to increase productivity by letting you and your employees use it while on the go. With our mobile integration, you can use hosted voice whenever you’re travelling on business. Then there’s our remote office feature, where any phone can be registered as a desk phone – this lets you use hosted voice from home.
If you feel that your small business needs its own PBX, you might find hosted voice to be a valuable solution. It’s cost effective, easy to implement, secure, reliable and you can use it while on the go, integrate it with your employees’ mobile phones, and adopt more features as and when you need them.