With remote and hybrid work now a part of normal life, your organization needs technology that will allow your employees to connect with one another and your customers regardless of where they are.
If your primary means of communication is still a legacy business telephone system, you were probably scrambling to adapt at the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Not to mention you were paying to maintain the costly infrastructure and hardware.
If you’re still looking for an alternative to that clunky phone system, you should consider Voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) technology.
According to Luca Jacobellis, president of IT and AV technology provider Onepath, VoIP is a common sense evolution of legacy phone systems.
Flexibility and availability
VoIP, like other unified communications tools, allows your employees to work from anywhere. That means they don’t have to be at their desks in the office to answer calls.
This can allow your company to be more flexible about working from home and other forms of remote work. If employees are sick at home, traveling for business or out of the office for other reasons, they can still take and make phone calls.
With the help of mobile and desktop applications, employees can use those tools to take calls rather than a physical phone connected to a phone line in the office.
However, a VoIP phone system doesn’t mean that you have to get rid of physical phones, Jacobellis says.
“You have the ability to use some with and some without,” he said.
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“There’s some really, really cool cloud-based contact center, call center-type solutions that can layer on top of both cloud systems and on-premise systems,” Jacobellis said.
Some VoIP deployments even allow for old phone systems for some of the company and a cloud-based system for others.
“So they’ve got an old phone system over there and a new cloud-based system in another location, but they can layer one unified call routing and handing system on top of it and get all the recording capability,” Jacobellis said.
Ease of migration and upgrades
Another attractive aspect of VoIP systems is the ability to adapt the system to different business needs without expensive upgrades. These systems can be scaled to meet the demands of the largest call centers down to the small local business.
But, every organization will eventually need to upgrade their systems. As the system ages, simple software upgrades will keep the system up to date and ensure that your organization’s communication abilities are ahead of the curve.
Those upgrades don’t come with that expensive price tag of legacy phone system upgrades, Jacobellis said.
“You can keep the back end and the feature sets up to date without expensive support contracts and upgrades,” Jacobellis said. “All of that kind of happens for you behind the scenes.”
Tommy Mullins, vice president of sales at Onepath, switching to a VoIP deployment has never been easier.
“You can actually do a soft cutover because you’ve got the infrastructure in place and you’re already using those legacy systems,” Mullins said. “You’re you’re cutting over and migrating to the bandwidth.”
Previously, providers would have to shut down the legacy systems and start from scratch.
“That was a very difficult thing to do,” Mullins said. “Now, migration plans are easy and we can modify those and very simply move you over.”
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