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.
Ed Mass is President of Mass Strategic Communications, Inc.,
a telecommunications consulting firm since 1993. Visit http://www.voip-telephone-system.com
and http://www.masscom.com
for more information. We specialize in Transforming Telecommunications
from a Tactical Tool To a Strategic Business Resource. We Integrate
Business Strategies with Technology Opportunities.
We act as an extension of your staff. We are business
strategists to increase the performance of your company through
intelligent and cost effective use of technology.
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 2006 Ed Mass and 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.
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