Business Tips

What is Hosted VoIP and Does My Small Business Need It?

  

As a small-to-mid-sized business, the capability to communicate is everything. Think about it for a moment. Try to imagine a day without a reliable way to touch base with your employees, your vendors, and most crucial of all, your customers. What if there’s a terrible storm and your phone lines are down? What if your connections are muddled and you can’t understand your customers over the phone?

No matter what new-fangled technology comes out, being able to communicate vocally with customers, vendors, employees, and anyone else who comes into contact with your business. Don’t get us wrong, reliable internet connections for automated chatbots, emailing, and beyond are crucial too—but it’s unlikely the business world will ever discard the need to communicate voice-to-voice with other people. Why? Because speaking to each other is part of our human connection. But ultimately, because customers still say they prefer directly speaking to a company representative over the phone.

Above all, you need to be able to communicate reliably and consistently, and that’s something that traditional phone lines and offerings can’t always promise. So, what’s the solution? If you, like so many others, are still relying on a traditional phone line to meet your business’ communication needs, you could be setting yourself up for risk that’s actually relatively easy to avoid.So, how exactly do you mitigate this type of communication risk and simultaneously set your business up for scalable growth, seamless communication capabilities, and better customer service than ever?

Three words. Business hosted voice.

If this is a new term for you—or even if you’ve heard it before but aren’t quite sure what business hosted voice is—you’re in the right place. Today, we’ll be diving into some of the ins-and-outs of business hosted voice in an effort to dissect what it is, how it can help, and why it matters substantially for small-to-mid-sized businesses seeking top-notch, cutting-edge communication. Keep reading to learn more about VoIP (that’s another term for business hosted voice, we’ll get to that in a second).

Let’s Talk Basics: What Does the Term “Business Hosted Voice” Mean?

When it comes down to understanding things like business hosted voice, it’s important not to let techie jargon get in the way. To avoid that, we’re going to break down a few simple definitions to give you a more real-world picture of what terms like business hosted voice and VoIP mean.

Hosted voice is a new, technologically-advanced way to connect you with others—your clients, your vendors, your employees, and beyond. This service is often referred to as VoIP, which stands for Voice over Internet Protocol). Ultimately, VoIP is a cloud-based service that usually depends on a third party to provide telephone connectivity through the internet (that’s where the whole VoIP abbreviation comes into play).

Understanding that VoIP is what people are talking about when they refer to the term business hosted voice is important to avoid confusion. Essentially, they’re one and the same and can mostly be used interchangeably. VoIP can be considered similar to a telephone service—but it’s a telephone service that relies on the internet for connectivity and that comes with a ton of additional benefits that traditional telephone services don’t.

This is especially helpful for small businesses who want to roll a bunch of communication benefits into one. In other words, there’s so much more to it than just incoming and outgoing calls. Still not entirely sure you’ve wrapped your head around VoIP? No problem. We’ve got an entire blog dedicated to the basics of VoIP that should help clear things up—feel free to give it a read and then come back to continue your hosted voice journey.

Why Hosted Voice Matters for Small Businesses Like Yours

We already outlined what VoIP is—and in that definition, it’s probably already becoming pretty clear as to how business hosted voice can benefit your business. But we want to make sure we’re giving you more than just the bare minimum, vague explanations. We’re going to really spell out real, tangible ways that VoIP can make substantial changes in your small business.

Above all, your business demands a reliable system that gets you connected with your employees and customers whenever and wherever—you don’t have time to deal with downed service, bad connections, or errors in the system. Opting for business hosted voice services can ensure that you are connected at all times—as long as you’re connected to the internet, you can assume you’ll have service.

Further, opting for VoIP allows you more freedom, too. As a small business that invests in business hosted voice, you can ultimately cut costs, save time, and ensure you never have to deal with the hassle of managing an outdated and antiquated phone system.

Plus, business hosted voice services often will offer you tons of extra solutions, like:

  • Around-the-clock tech support
  • End-to-end management
  • Unified nationwide calling
  • VIP ringing
  • Call waiting
  • IVR menus
  • Cloud-management for easy, streamlined maintenance
  • Smart calling
  • Call park

And that’s just the very tip of the iceberg when it comes to VoIP features.

Ultimately, VoIP is that lesser-known, barely-talked-about ingredient that takes a business’ communication capability from average to absolutely incredible. It’s hard to know what’s missing from a communication plan if you’re used to traditional phone services, but with VoIP offerings, you can upgrade and elevate your communication strategy simply and seamlessly. It might be a bold take, but we believe that if taking your business to the next level is on your list of goals, then VoIP should be on your list of must-have business tools.

Dialing on a phone

The Top Business Benefits of Business Hosted Voice

The overarching, obvious benefit of choosing business hosted voice services over a traditional phone service is that you’ll have access to reliable, smarter, and optimized communication. That’s the greatest and most poignant benefit of all (in our eyes, anyway).

But the list of business VoIP advantages doesn’t end there.

When small and mid-sized businesses choose to invest in services like business hosted voice, they also choose to open an entire world of benefits, like:

  • Smarter, more optimized workflows thanks to technologically-advanced, cutting-edge features
  • An easy way to manage all communication costs in one, cohesive place
  • Simplified and unified communication strategies
  • Technical support and customer care devoted to remedying issues and providing smart solutions around the clock
  • End-to-end management and start-to-finish solutions
  • A freed-up personal IT team that isn’t stuck pivoting and providing solutions for antiquated phone systems when they fail
  • Increased flexibility for both in-house and remote workers
  • Access to the company’s voice services from anywhere at any time
  • Smart technology that provides useful data insight to help you make better business decisions than ever

Optimum Business—Your Business Hosted Voice Solution

Change the way you communicate forever—opt for a seamless, simple, and straightforward business hosted voice solution from Optimum Business.

At Optimum, we thoroughly understand and whole-heartedly stand by a businesses’ need to communicate rapidly, without issue, and consistently—that’s why we’ve created VoIP services that offer intuitive solutions for next-level communication strategies. If you’re ready to revitalize and revamp the way you communicate with your customers, vendors, employees, and beyond, we encourage you to reach out to our sales team to kickstart your business hosted voice journey today.

Still have questions? Check out our Optimum Business hosted voice service page to get the full run-down of what we can offer you. Don’t hesitate to reach out to our expert team with questions or inquiries—that’s what we’re here for!