Much like IT, business telecoms has taken to the cloud! Gone are the days where you are limited to the amount of simultaneous calls that can be made, or the fact you are bound to your office to make and receive business calls, whilst looking at an outdated PBX on the wall. Nowadays everyone is on the move and the importance to run a business in a flexible and cost-effective manner is vital to SMEs. I have put together seven main reasons why moving your telecoms to a fully hosted VoIP platform will be a breath of fresh air to your business.
Continuity - Continuity is one of the most important aspects in business especially around IT and telecoms. As a business telecoms specialist, we know the importance of telecoms and having the right procedures in place in an event of a disaster. In the past you could wait for days for BT Openreach to have a look at a line/broadband issue whilst you are left twiddling your thumbs with no telecoms. With a fully hosted phone system, that worry can be eliminated straight away. You can setup up procedures so that in an event of a disaster, all your calls are diverted elsewhere such as through to another branch, a set of mobile phones or maybe something simple such as an answering service or mailbox, and all this can be done automatically without you having to do anything. You don’t have to suffer from everything coming to a halt whilst you wait on third parties to fix the issue.
Cost effective - Are you fed up of paying high line rental, high call charges and even higher maintenance fees? If so, a hosted phone system is the right move for you. Hosted means cloud based, which also means, you no longer have the need to have a big old PBX sitting on a wall in your building. Instead, have the PBX in the cloud. By doing this, you remove the hardware to maintain which results in no maintenance fees. Again, since calls will be running over an internet connection you can reduce your line rental and call charges. In addition to this, if you have outgrown your current PBX, installing new ISDN lines is an expensive task. Instead, you can have as many extensions as you need with a hosted phone system and all that is needed is an additional extension and a phone. An added bonus is that inter business calls on the same system are free of charge - you don’t have to be charged for calling your own business!
Flexibility - A hosted phone system can be as flexible as you need it to be; whether that be tagging calls for multiple departments or business names, voicemail2email, forwarding calls through to remote workers or simply having an interactive voice response to divert calls through to the right people… the list goes on. You are not bound to have your staff in the office, if you have remote workers, they can still have an extension on the system by using a softphone app for their smart phone or a desk phone at their house, whilst still displaying the company number on external calls.
Scalability - Growing your business can be a stressful time, this added with the additional spend of hardware and delayed timescales can be an unwanted headache. Fortunately adding a new phone and extension to your new hosted system is a stress free and easy task. Just add or remove extensions as and when you need them.
Control - Most SMEs like not having to worry about managing their IT or telecoms but if you want to have control over changes to your setup, that’s not a problem either. By logging into a secure URL, you can make changes to the system yourself which means you can keep your support costs down.
Expandability - If you are in the process of moving office, opening further branches or have plans to in the future, you don’t need to worry about the pressure of cancelling/moving lines to accommodate this. With your numbers hosted in the cloud, you can take your phones anywhere you need to as long as there is an internet connection. Alternatively, if you need phones to ring in two branches, this can also be done with a simple hunt group routing so no need for complicated phone systems features.
Protection - Like with our IT, we take security very seriously. With telecoms, it’s no different. We will set daily call spend limits on your extensions so that the system cannot be hacked and generate high call charges thus protecting your business. In the unlikely attempt of a breach the system would be locked down straight away, something that isn’t available with traditional PBX phone systems.
At LMS Group we want you to have the best communications at the best price. We will work with you to make sure the system is built bespoke to your needs. We will clearly breakdown any savings to be made through our bill analysis so that you can see exactly where you’re saving money. If you would like to find out more about how we can help your business or if you would like us to carry out a free telecoms audit please contact us by visiting
