A Hosted Phone System and Service grows with your business with its inherent flexibility and affordability. Cloud telephony has changed the model for telecom investment to the benefit of business start-ups and growth companies. Traditional approaches to phone system investment made it necessary for companies to accurately predict their system needs in the face of over investment in systems when capital can be best used elsewhere or under building their system and dealing with replacement as growth occurs. Hosted phone service has essentially made this approach a relic!
Because the physical phone system is no longer a requirement on-site and is managed by the hosted phone service provider, companies only purchase the desk phones or soft phones required for their business as it stands at that current time. As employees requiring a phone are hired, additional handsets are purchased and deployed at that time. The monthly service cost are typically built on a per user basis, as there are no more phone lines required or restrictions in terms of incoming or outgoing calls. Therefore, companies are only investing in the capital and service as they need it.
The hosted service is basically a software program that can be re-configured as your company’s needs change. Good hosted providers consult with you and build the configuration of the system to match your needs. As you grow, your desire to change call flow, create departmental ring groups or queues, and institute other programmatic changes can be administered by your hosted provider. Finding a provider that can serve as your phone department also helps keep your costs of maintaining and growing a system to a minimum.
Company growth also puts pressure on infrastructure costs from a facility perspective, whether you’ve outgrown your current location or need to explore additional branches. A hosted phone system can help in many ways:
- Deferring Facility Relocation – Moving a business is extremely expensive. A hosted phone service can help defer the timing of facility expansion through the facilitation of a work at home model or a temporary office set up. Because the phone system is not dedicated to a physical site, you can deploy employees at their homes or temporary office merely by purchasing the handsets and programming the call flow accordingly.
- Facilitating Branch Models – Whether the branch is located in the same town as your headquarters or in other towns across the country, a hosted phone system can make this economical in several ways. First, phone numbers for the particular locality can be provided, but calls between locations can be extension dials. Administrative personnel do not have to be duplicated branch by branch. Callers to the branch looking for billing or customer service support, as examples, can be directed to where those personnel are located and retain the perception that they are being served locally. Finally, many hosted providers offer a reduced price per user as you grow.
- Supporting Targeted Employee Recruitment – If your headquarters is located where certain employee skill sets are difficult to find or expensive to secure, you can establish an office in a town where such skills are plentiful and affordable. Your hosted service can direct calls for such employee groups to that location and callers will be unaware that they are being supported outside of the area.
The economy is improving and there are many jobs being added every month. If your business is so fortunate to be addressing the “pains” of growth, help ease the pain by investigating a hosted phone service today! The investment will have benefits for years to come and free you to grow without the restriction of traditional phone systems.
About the author: Mark Greim is the Vice President of Sales and Marketing at sipVine, a provider of a variety of digital phone solutions and services. Mark has extensive experience working for start-up or entrepreneurial organizations and has a passion for affordable, reliable, and purposeful technology solutions in those environments.
