VoIP has become a very popular option among many businesses today. Vendors are always innovating in order to compete with each other, making now an ideal time for an organisation to start looking into their next phone system for their business. You will need to make a lot of different decisions as part of upgrading your phone system to VoIP, including the hardware to buy, whether or not to opt for hosted services, and many more.
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For most companies, even for small businesses, the switch to VoIP is usually a pretty straightforward process. Choose a reliable hosted VoIP system, like a Microsoft Teams phone system, from a reputable vendor, and buy the hardware that you need. This isn’t expensive to do, and the whole process can comfortably be achieved within a few days. However, there is more to VoIP than just saving you money over traditional alternatives for the phone system. Cost is usually the driving factor for businesses considering the switch, but there is more to consider beyond your budget.
If you can use your VoIP system to its fullest potential, then you can improve the productivity of both your employees and processes. Here are a few tips and tricks to get the most from your VoIP system.
If you business is small, with no more than three of your employees, then installing VoIP phones isn’t a complex task to achieve at all. However, what happens if you have 40 employees or 300 employees? Do you want to spend time, that could be better spent elsewhere, on installing phones for each desk? While phones are being installed, nobody can get any work done, which wastes a lot of time for your business. To get over this problem, choose a VoIP system that comes with auto-provisioning.
Auto-provisioning means that the phones can get their configuration settings automatically from a server that has been set up in advance. All you need to do is plug the phone in. You won’t need an expert to install the settings or have employees with nothing to do while they wait for their phones to be installed. Just plug in the phone with the right cables and your office is ready to start using the system.
With a VoIP system, the efficiency improvements start right from you when you start using it. These systems give you the flexibility to answer calls on any device that you have with you. To get the most from your system, take advantage of this capability. Tell your employees to install the appropriate apps on all the work devices, including laptops, phones, and tablets. This way, they can always remain in touch with each other and with your customers. This is very useful for working from home or staying in touch for those who regularly travel to meetings or for sales purposes.
Some vendors will offer their own apps that can be used across multiple platforms, whereas others allow you to use their service with the app of your choice. The second option means your individual employees can make more choices about the apps they prefer to use. This is useful, as the features that someone of your sales team may find useful will likely to be different than the features that someone in accounts will need, and vice versa. Don’t think of VoIP as a simple upgrade to your old phone. Use the latest features and tools that VoIP can offer to streamline your task flows.
Use this tip to improve the quality of your voice calls. Many businesses think that it’s not worth spending money on more expensive VoIP phones. If you can’t afford more expensive phones, than you don’t have to use them, quality hardware provides great value for the price that you pay. With mobile devices, your calls will depend on the network speed and bandwidth. If your carrier experiences heavy congestion on the network, then your calls may drop or not even go through at all.
With a good quality desk phone, these issues don’t have to be a concern. You will get better audio quality and fewer technical problems when you have good equipment. Better quality desk phones also come equipped with extra features, such as bigger screens, conferencing capabilities, programmable function buttons and more. All of these features can be used to increase your office productivity very effectively. Your employees will be able to save a lot of time when they don’t have to repeat themselves due to a bad line or deal with calls dropping out. Dropping calls also seems unprofessional, so quality hardware will help with your reputation as well.
One of the main advantages of VoIP systems is that users don’t have to learn anything before using it in order to make calls. The user experience is exactly the same as it was before you changed your phones to a VoIP system. You can still increase efficiency, however, by giving all your employees who will be using the system some training on how to use the latest features. You won’t gain much from your new system if everyone just continues to use the new system in exactly the same way that they used the old one.
Hold a few training and informational sessions, so your team can learn more about the more advanced features of VoIP. When they know how to configure their phones in a way that they like, each employee can set up their phone to suit their style of working. This means that you don’t have to waste time while people have to spend ages searching through the manual or website trying to work out how to enable a feature that they need. You could split the sessions into smaller groups, that are tailored to each department, like customer support, or sales, so nobody misses out on a feature that they could make good use of, but don’t know exists.
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