Cut the cord on traditional phone service and cut your business phone bills in half
Remember the first time you made a phone call using Skype? You may not have been impressed. If you were using early Voice over IP (VoIP), it wasn’t all that wonderful. Even as recently as a couple years ago, VoIP was still in the realm of “it sort-of works” geekdom. And it sounded that way. But today, it’s a state of the art technology that’s often the preferred system for smart and nimble small businesses that want to stretch their communication dollars.
Back when it wasn’t so dependable and the sound quality left a lot to be desired, we expected VoIP phone service offerings to undercut the price of traditional service. Today, however, it’s often impossible to know if your call is via a landline or coming from the web. This is thanks to massive increases in Internet speeds, and some amazing innovation in the technology used by VoIP service providers. The quality is not only up to snuff – it’s also now significantly cheaper to go with VoIP.
The costs, compared
A small or medium-sized business can’t get by without a dedicated phone system. It’s such a necessity that few businesses stop to consider the alternatives to traditional services. You contact the phone company (and often they have few, if any, competitors), and you pay whatever they tell you the price is for each phone line you need.
Those costs have decreased in recent years as the legacy phone companies struggle to stay competitive and relevant. Even so, after taxes and fees, a traditional business phone line can cost from between $50 to $100 a month.
Oh, but you want the bells and whistles? Call transfers, phone directories, and intercoms? That’s going to take a Private Branch Exchange (PBX) system. The monthly price of the lines won’t go up, but you’ll have to shell out for the PBX system hardware. That can cost you thousands of dollars. Let’s say you have a small business with 10 employees. It can cost between $500 to $2,000 per user to install the infrastructure for each of their phone lines.
Virtual equipment
Yes, you still need phones, no matter which way you go. The difference here is that VoIP gives you latitude. It’s not about the hardware. In fact, you can think of the entire phone system as software – VoIP is more like an application than a piece of equipment.
Your PBX is the cloud. You don’t lease lines. Instead, an Internet connection is your phone line. And a typical broadband connection can support well beyond 100 high-quality calls simultaneously. Phone calls can travel wherever there’s an Internet connection, as VoIP service can find you anywhere based on IP protocols. Salespeople on the go can have office calls automatically transferred to their mobile devices, so you’re no longer stuck to having a number that can only ring the phone on your desk.
Another way to look at it is that you’re not just getting a call – the VoIP system is sending you the entire application in a digital format so you can use practically any device, anywhere.
An Achilles heel?
Often, the first thing people think about when contemplating parting ways with the traditional phone company and hooking up with a VoIP provider is, “What happens the first time there’s a power outage?” After all, everything that uses the cloud needs juice. CallSprout has made this a non-issue by implementing multiple redundant systems.
Our backup systems use complementary data technology such as 4G LTE. Calls get through, no matter what.
Ongoing savings
Smart businesses of any size are looking for ways to stay agile as up and down business cycles come quicker and steeper. Recurring costs can drop with VoIP by as much as 50%. The on-demand flexibility of the cloud is extended to your phone system, as adaptation is automatically handled by software.
Plus, you’re not responsible for maintaining the hardware at the heart of a traditional business phone system. Remember, the “hardware” of a VoIP system is a collection of software applications. It also means that functionality upgrades or new technology are just a matter of your provider pushing it to you through the cloud.
Is everything about VoIP cheaper than a traditional PBX telephone phone system? Almost.
You will incur increased bandwidth cost. However, the overall savings you gain – which can be up to 50% – far outweighs this. And CallSprout offers an all-inclusive suite of options that the phone companies charge a premium for, including auto-attendant, voicemail to email, call forwarding, and more.
Fill out this convenient form to find out exactly how much your business can save this year – there’s a good chance you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the number.
