Today’s workforce is more dispersed. It demands flexibility, grows unpredictably and expects advanced communication features like conferencing or caller ID to be intuitive, and come as standard.
Traditional analogue business phone systems are ill equipped to meet the new demands of today’s workforce – which is one reason why more companies are switching to VoIP hosted telephony every day. Here’s five more good reason why more businesses turn to the next generation of cloud based telecoms.

1. It’s cheaper

Small businesses that switch to VoIP reduce the cost of their local calls by up to 40%

Those same small businesses reduce the cost of their international calls by up to 90%

VoIP can cut initial startup costs for a new business by up to 90%

We’ve all come to terms with the fact that VoIP means cheaper solutions for business. For costs of around £12.00 per user per month you can get a bundle that includes a premium fully featured VoIP License, UK national and UK mobile minutes, a Polycom digital handset or a softphone for either mobile or desktop, and 24/7 customer support. But the biggest cost savings can come at start-up.

Compare the start-up costs of a traditional phone company with those of a VoIP provider. Typically the old style phone provider wants to install a PBX box in your office. Ticket prices for these boxes come in at about £2000 but they lose around 70% of their value as soon as they’re installed.

Installation comes at a cost too, as will the upgrades you’ll inevitably need when your business grows and the PBX switch reaches capacity. VoIP avoids high start-up and ongoing usage charges.

2. Remote working actually works

VoIP allows your staff to work the way more people want to work today Nearly 14% of the workforce works from home these days and 7.5 million workers in the UK now say that they’d rather work from home one day a week than receive a pay rise. But traditional phone companies really struggle to deliver the unified communications that makes flexible working seamless. As a result, working from home comes with compromise: receptionists tell customers “you’re not in the office today and you can’t be reached”, simply because you’ve forgotten to forward calls from the desk phone. Needless costs are acquired because staff use mobile phones to keep in touch with colleagues, and company process suffers when customers bypass your established communications channels and start calling staff direct via mobile.

VoIP means desktop phones, smartphones, tablets, and PCs all work with one phone number as easily as email works today across all devices.

3. Attracting the best skills at the best price is easier

Getting the best skills at the best prices these days means being able to recruit nationally, or in extreme cases internationally, but you need to be confident that new workers can be fully integrated into the company quickly and cheaply no matter where they are located.

Using a VoIP system means your skills chosen disparate workforce can communicate at local call costs, and equip them with the business grade fully featured phones service they need to support modern day communications.

4. Expanding in new locations is simpler

Things can change quickly in small-medium businesses: One day most of the revenue focuses around London – one big business win later, Edinburgh becomes your most important business centre.

Meeting the needs of a fast changing client base requires a degree of agility that traditional phone systems just can’t deliver. Old style phone companies want to support your new location with dedicated fixed lines that take time and money, just when you need to get new sites and staff up and running quickly.

Success depends on being able to upscale as soon as your business needs it without compromising the high levels of customer service that won you new business in the first place.

On day one, your VoIP phone system may be supporting just one new homeworker in one new region but that’s a situation you want to build on quickly. VoIP means that new customers get the professional level of customer service they expect from the first day you set up in a new location, and continue to experience it as you grow, move and expand.

5. The most advanced services come as standard

Most companies discover they don’t have advanced calling features the hard way, when they try to use something like three way calling, conferencing or call forwarding only to discover that these services are bolt-on extras they don’t have and don’t know how to get.

With VoIP, most features come as standard, and when new services come along, they’re typically included too. Thereafter, they’re always easy to access, change or manage by the system administrator.