New technologies such as IP Telephony don't just replace previous ones but allow much greater functionality, increased productivity, enhanced customer service and lower costs than prior technologies. Here are just a few ideas for you to ponder.
Your IP Telephone System provides the following advantages:
* Seamless extension dialing between all your locations on your private network, or even over the public Internet, is relatively easy and much less costly than traditional means. All your offices can be "tied together" to act as one large office no matter where in the world they are located. This also provides the advantage of eliminating long distance charges between your locations.
* IP Telephony creates lower cost and greater functionality advantages from carrier services. With IP Telephony you can connect all your offices together on your own private network. Or you can use the "quasi-private" network of a carrier.
This means you use one service provider to provide the voice trunks at each office. Your voice traffic between offices stays on the private network of the carrier. Your voice traffic never has to travel through the public internet.
If done correctly you have the advantage of carrying your voice traffic over the same network that carries your data traffic between offices but through the service provider you have Quality of Service to give voice priority over data. This will also give you a lower cost than the traditional means of a totally private network connecting your offices.
* Easily and economically connecting home based workers. Your home based worker can be easily connected to your office phone system with a high speed connection such as DSL or cable Internet. Your worker takes a phone from your office and connects it to that Internet connection. Or your worker uses a "soft phone" which is software on their computer at home that functions like a telephone.
That physical phone or soft phone, located anywhere in the world, is now a phone on your office phone system with all the individual settings that worker has on their phone at the office. Someone calls your office and the call automatically rings the phone at your worker's home. The caller doesn't know where the person they're calling is located. This arrangement can even work for a small one, two, or three person branch office.
* Easily and economically connecting traveling workers. Imagine you're traveling and staying at a hotel with a high speed Internet connection. You have a "soft phone" on your laptop computer. You can use a headset on your laptop or a handset that plugs into a USB port on your computer. The handset acts just like the handset on your phone at the office. You can now receive and make calls through your soft phone just like you're at your office. Callers will ring through to your soft phone.
You can be located anywhere in the world and the person you call or calls you won't know where you are. If you're going to be away for an extended period of time, you may even want to take a regular office phone and set it up on your Internet connection. This arrangement makes use of IP Telephony for your office combined with VOIP using the Internet. IP Telephony makes all this easily possible at a lower cost than traditional systems.
Home based and traveling workers can also go into your office, in fact any of your office locations, and simply "log in" to your phone system just like they log in to your computer system. Once logged in all their phone settings are automatically provided to the phone in which they log in. This just wasn't easy or feasible to do economically prior to IP Telephony.
* Software upgrades are much easier and can be performed by you instead of paying the telephone equipment vendor to do them.
There are many more benefits to IP Telephony. This brief overview should be enough to peak your interest to continue your investigation. You don't need to make a total swap out of your current phone system. It is possible to gradually introduce an IP Telephone System into your organization and interface it to legacy systems.
Don't just improve the way you currently do business! Explore the strategic business applications and implications of IP Telephony. New technologies such as IP Telephony don't just replace previous ones but allow much greater functionality, increased productivity, enhanced customer service and lower costs than prior technologies.
Expand the possibilities of conducting your business in ways you never thought possible. All major phone system manufacturers are investing their research and development dollars into development of their IP Phone Systems. Thousands of companies have already converted to it. There must be a reason or two or twenty.
Specifically, we consult on IP Telephone System Decisions, Service Provider Decisions for Voice and Data Services, and Services Audits to Inventory All Services and Discover Unused Services. We do all this within a framework of Vendor-Neutral Consulting.
Copyright 2007 Mass Strategic Communications, Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. Reprint Rights: You may reprint this article as long as you do not edit the article in any way. You must leave all of the links active and include the full author name credit with company profile.
About The Author
Ed Mass, President, Mass Strategic Communications, Inc., a telecommunications consulting firm since 1993. Visit http://www.voip-telephone-system.com and http://www.masscom.com. The firm specializes in Transforming Telecommunications from a Tactical Tool To a Strategic Business Resource.
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