Businesses in any field always need to be on the lookout for ways in which they might improve their efficiency levels and do more with the resources they have at their disposal.
One area in which there are clear gains to be made for enterprises of all sizes in terms of improving the way they operate and function is in the context of communications.
Increasingly, having better and more flexible communications systems enables businesses to become more competitive and better able to meet the needs of their customers.
In recent years, hosted telephony has emerged to become a key part of the equation when it comes to enterprise communications and the benefits are becoming increasingly accessible to businesses of all sizes.
How hosted telephony works
Traditional office communication systems have long relied on fixed line telephones that link to a particular handset on a specific desk via a myriad of different cables and connections.
All of which has been perfectly fit for purpose in years gone by but by today’s standards it is a relatively rigid system that lacks the flexibility and the mobility that is so often required and expected by contemporary professionals.
Rather than being tied to a specific desk and a network of cables, hosted telephony systems take an organisation’s communications into the realms of cloud computing, which immediately makes them more flexible and easier to manage.
With hosted telephony (otherwise known as hosted voice or VoIP) a company of any size can manage and enable all of its communications via the internet, which means there is no need for much of the hardware associated with traditional enterprise telephony systems.
A key advantage of using hosted telephony instead of a more traditional system is that individuals can use broadband connections to have phone calls routed to either an office-based handset or to a mobile device of their choosing.
As with so many other common workplace processes, such as sharing documents with colleagues for example, the advent of cloud computing has made the process of making and receiving phone calls something that can now be done seamlessly from anywhere and on a variety of different devices. All of which opens up valuable flexibility from a communications perspective for individuals, for teams of professionals and for entire enterprises.
To date, many of the largest organisations and employers around, who you might expect to be among the first to transition towards the use of hosted telephony, have in fact been slow to act in the regard. The reason for this is often that they have long-standing relationships and costly contracts in place with traditional telephony service providers.
Nevertheless, the benefits of switching to hosted voice are now well understood and certainly aren’t lost on small and medium-sized enterprises across a wide range of industries.
Here are some of the most important benefits of hosted telephony for businesses:
Scalability
If you are running a small or medium-sized company then the flexibility that comes along with hosted telephony can be a major advantage. In essence, a hosted system can grow and be expanded along with your needs as a business, even at very short notice.
With hosted telephony, there is no need to be specific or to plan ahead to account for precisely for how small or large your communications systems will need to be in months or years to come. Because it’s a cloud-based system, none of that matters and you can scale the scope of your network up or down as required.
Business continuity
Another perspective from which hosted telephony can be seen to offer potentially very significant advantages for enterprises of all sizes is with regard to the issue of business continuity.
Simply by virtue of not being pinned to any single location, hosted telephony systems are inherently safer and more robust than traditional alternatives.
A hosted system means that business communications can be maintained under virtually any circumstances because they’re being hosted in the cloud and are managed on a virtual basis via the internet.
Performance management
Establishing a hosted telephony system can also deliver considerable benefits when it comes to performance management and assessment.
Phone calls can be recorded and stored automatically in a way that makes it much easier for an individual’s or a team’s performance to be monitored and data to be collected in ways that help businesses refine their processes and train their employees.
Saving money
Hosted telephony also opens up the prospect for businesses to save very considerable amounts of money in a variety of ways.
As compared with the costs associated with traditional telephony systems, hosted voice is inexpensive because it requires very low capital outlay and lower line costs.
A hosted voice package is usually paid for on the basis of a fixed-price monthly subscription and that price won’t then require any additional payments for maintenance services.
Plus calls between colleagues within an organisation are always free of charge when a hosted telephony system is in place.
Security
Another advantage of having your business telephony systems hosted with the help of cloud computing is that they are easier to routinely protect against hacking threats and data breaches.
A high quality enterprise hosted voice setup will be built from the ground up with security very much in mind, which means data encryption, gateway security and anti-fraud measures can be integrated as standard from the outset.
A clear trend
Hosted telephony is taking off more rapidly in some settings than in others, with the benefits having been seized upon particularly swiftly by businesses which rely heavily on call centres, for example.
But good communications are at the heart of what almost every business does in the 21st century and so it’s no surprise that hosted voice is increasingly coming to underpin the activities of small, medium and larger-scale enterprises right around the world.
Why we chose Horizon…
There are a number of rival hosted telephony service providers currently operating in the market worldwide but, for us at TTG, the Horizon platform from Gamma Telecom was the clear choice.
Horizon offers the best and most powerful telephony solutions around and that’s why we partner with them and are trained to install their systems.
We have seen first-hand just how powerful and effective Horizon’s solutions can be and what an impact they can have in benefitting our customers’ businesses of all sizes in the UK.
If you would like to find out more about hosted telephony, please download our Hosted Telephony brochure from here or give us a call today.
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