Advantages of Hosted VoIP vs. Traditional Business Phone Service
Is your business reevaluating its business phone service contract? If it’s been a while since you’ve gone through this process, you’ll find that the landscape has changed considerably in recent years. Traditional landline phone service used to be the only choice. Upstart challengers like VoIP hit the scene, but early iterations were clearly inferior to the status quo.
Not anymore: hosted VoIP business phone technology has evolved, and businesses of all sizes are turning to hosted VoIP service with increasing frequency.
We highly recommend VoIP to just about every customer who’s evaluating phone service or looking for ways to trim their telecom budget.
Here are the reasons why.
1. Massive Cost Differences: VoIP Is More Affordable
The biggest driver of VoIP adoption is cost: the average monthly cost per “line” (there aren’t really lines with VoIP, but that’s a separate conversation) on VoIP is often half the cost of traditional phone service.
Honestly, we could probably end the post right here — cutting your phone bill in half (or maybe even more) is enough for most businesses to make the switch. But the cost savings don’t stop here.
If you’re up for a building remodel or you’re building a new facility, you have one more cost-related reason to consider VoIP: wiring.
Traditional phone service means running copper wire alongside your network cabling. VoIP runs everything over a single LAN cable (full-duplex service), with voice and data (and sometimes even power) running over a single cable.
2. Wireless, Location-Agnostic Service
VoIP is a huge advantage to remote or hybrid teams because your employees’ phone numbers or extensions are no longer tied to a physical connection at their office desk.
Depending on the VoIP service you choose, your employees’ VoIP extension can be tied to their broader system login (such as their Microsoft 365 or Active Directory credentials): wherever they open their laptop and log in, they instantly have access to their VoIP extension.
Depending on the software you use for your VoIP system, your team members will likely be able to place and receive VoIP calls from their smartphones, too. This is excellent from a privacy standpoint, because your staff do not need to give out their personal cell phone numbers to clients.
3. Massive Hardware Flexibility
Continuing from the previous point, being able to access your extension from anywhere means you have a wide range of options for how to access it.
VoIP systems give you incredible hardware flexibility. In office settings, your employees can operate with a VoIP phone on their desks that looks and feels pretty similar to the one they used to have (albeit usually a lot lighter).
But they don’t have to operate this way. They could also take VoIP calls over software via USB headset or even via their laptop’s internal speakers and microphone — perfect for remote workers and those on hybrid schedules.
And like we mentioned, they can also access their extensions on their smartphones. This is perfect for skilled trade businesses where most of the staff spend the majority of their time on the road. These workers typically do not even need a desk phone or laptop at all.
The bottom line here is that you are not tied to one way of doing things. You don’t have to exclusively use smartphones, or exclusively use laptops or desk phones. You can mix and match different types of hardware in a way that works best for your unique business.
4. More Capability Than Landline Service
We’ve hinted at this already, but modern VoIP systems can do more than landline systems—without costly add-ons and purpose-built hardware.
Here are just a few of the features that VoIP provides:
- Number portability
- Conference bridges
- Custom music on hold
- Ring groups and hunt groups
- Time conditions to route calls differently based on the time of day or day of the week
- Group voicemail boxes
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are many more features that come standard with most VoIP systems. Implementing these features in your phone system will give your business a more polished, professional appearance to your clients and prospects.
Landline service either can’t offer these or makes you pay extra. With landlines, you pay more and get less – it’s as simple as that.
5. Better Voice Quality
Last, you’ll get better voice quality by switching to VoIP.
Yes, you read that right.
We know: if you tried VoIP a decade or two ago, you probably don’t believe us here. When the technology was new, voice quality was generally awful, as was reliability.
But everything is better today: processors, internet connections, the software powering our VoIP experiences, and the microphones and speakers in our everyday devices. All of these improve the call quality far beyond cellular quality and usually well beyond what you get over traditional landlines.
Ready to Learn More? We Can Help
For most businesses, switching to VoIP service is a no-brainer. There are a few technical details to be aware of, like overall business bandwidth requirements and the importance of a backup or failover internet connection (which you likely need anyway if you’re moving to the cloud). But generally, even after we help businesses work through these considerations, VoIP is still the obvious winner.
Questions? Ready to discuss what a VoIP transition would look like for your business? We can help.
Reach out to our team today to learn more or discuss next steps.
