As a start-up business, you might think that a feature-rich VoIP telephone system, is something to consider way down the line. That’s after you’ve got your business up and running and staff working with you. But, quite the opposite is true … If you go with VoIP from day-one, in a planned way, you can build a telecom’s structure with a lot of benefits. VoIP will help your business, provide most of your IT structure, start low-cost and simple, and just grow along with you.
Many businesses start with just one person working out of their own home. Typically the first step will be to get a phone line for the business, and of course, that comes with a new number that’s put on business cards and all your marketing literature. But all this unravels when you take the next step and move out to an office and get other people involved in your company. That’s because the line & phone-number you have can’t be transferred to your new office, calls to your employees home-offices will cost, and calls into your business can’t be answered by somebody else working at a different location (without you paying for diverts).
VoIP can start small … For less than the cost of Setting up a new phone line, you can set up a single VoIP phone on your existing broadband service – with a new phone number and with services such as call diversion, caller ID display & voice-mail. Calls to your number are delivered to your phone through broadband, and this means that no matter where you are, you can plug your phone into a broadband router, and it will receive your calls. As more people come on-board, you can put VoIP phones at their home-offices too, and have all phones ring for incoming calls, have extension & direct dial numbers for each, and make calls between your phones free of charge! A further advantage is that when it comes time to move out of your home office, that contact number that you have worked so hard to market to your customers, moves with you (no matter where you want to move to!).
Hosted extensions working off phone systems residing in the Internet [the ‘Cloud’] may be great for starting off with … However, as your business expands, you’ll find that adding more extensions increases your monthly rental charges. You might also want to have more flexibility with some telephony features, such as assigning marketing messages while callers are on hold, and even creating auto-attendants to guide callers to specific people or departments. When you bring your staff together into your new office, you’ll get big advantages out of installing your own VoIP telephone system – which will use the same telephones you have already been using – with hosted [SIP] trunk lines from the same carrier, and with the same numbers transferred from your hosted extensions. Having your own system, allows you to expand your operation without incurring additional extension rental costs, because the SIP Trunk channels cost much less than an extension rental (and typically, you need a lot less Trunks than extensions!). While there is a set-up cost, the Return on that Investment is fast, because your line and channel costs are reduced. An ideal example of an entry-level phone system, is Yeastar’s S20, as it provides you with an Enterprise grade ‘telephony’ feature-set for up to 20 phones – all at a reasonable cost!
As a further leap in sophistication, you can then upgrade a low-end VoIP platform, to incorporate advanced call handling facilities (such as you’d see in e.g. a call centre operation), integration with Customer data for both incoming and outgoing calls, and Unified Messaging. Our 3CX platform can add all the facilities you’ll ever need, by simply installing an IP-PBX server and doing some software configuration. Your phones and IT network remain the same, but what they then can do takes a quantum leap! …
In summary, it is possible to start your business at home, and take that same phone and phone number with you from your kitchen table, out to your corner office on the 21st floor of ‘MyBusiness Towers’, in a structured, planned and cost-effective way – rather than having to dump what you have at each step, build a-new, and re-educate your customer base regarding your contact details.
Contact us at Foxhall Solutions to talk about how this can work for you – & how we can help you by taking some of the difficulties out of starting and moving your business … Call us at 01787 228 402 …
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