While the avenues of communication available to businesses have greatly expanded over the past two decades, the majority of important communication still takes place over the phone.
While mobile devices have revolutionised the way people communicate, business telephony has been largely stagnant for years. With global internet infrastructure rapidly improving and data costs dropping massively, VoIP telephony is rapidly gaining market share by delivering incredible call quality paired with low costs and incredible features.
While VoIP will bring benefits to most businesses, it will deliver far more to some than others, and this is especially apparent with smaller growing businesses.
VoIP Keeps Costs Down
Regardless of industry, small and medium businesses tend to face similar challenges around facilitating rapid growth while keeping costs as low as possible without stifling that growth.
This tends to manifest as a bit of a ‘chicken and egg’ problem: the business needs more communication capacity to generate more sales but needs more sales to pay for the added capacity. VoIP technology brings fantastic improvements for growing businesses, both in the cost and the scalability aspects.
When it comes to cost, there are two primary costs associated with business telephony: line costs and call rates. VoIP cuts down on both of these. With line costs, VoIP uses existing internet infrastructure, consolidating costs into a single service.
As for call costs, these come primarily from calls carried over the Public Switched Telephone Network, or PSTN. While the costs of transporting data, as VoIP does, have plummeted to almost nothing, PSTN costs have remained static. This means that VoIP calls, which are routed over internet infrastructure as much as possible, cut down on the carriage charges massively, potentially eliminating them entirely for VoIP to VoIP calls.
This call cost saving is especially apparent when it comes to international calling, as international VoIP providers can provide the entire international portion of the carriage as data with little to no added expense, only passing an effective local call on to the PSTN in the destination country, resulting in an incredibly cheap calling.
VoIP Facilitates Expansion
VoIP delivers massively superior scaling for businesses in addition to these important cost savings. To add capacity with ‘traditional’ telephony, more physical lines are required, usually causing delays and substantial cost. VoIP requires extra data capacity, often only needing a service change, but also does not impose a ‘hard’ limit – VoIP can be used beyond ideal capacity at a cost of call quality, so even if the speed increase takes time to roll out, your business can continue to grow.
VoIP also empowers businesses to take advantage of modern technologies, facilitating cooperation and remote working by allowing workers to use the same phone number regardless of physical location as well as easily integrating with video conferencing technologies.
All businesses can benefit from what VoIP offers – flexibility, cost reductions and modernization. For smaller businesses, though, these benefits can easily create the difference between financially secure successful growth and slow decline into stagnation.
