Voice over internet protocol (VoIP) phone service can scale to fit any business. It’s also an inexpensive option that fits small companies and even startups. But if you’re an enterprise organization, you need enterprise VoIP services. How can you be sure you’re getting enterprise-level service and all the features you need? Here are five of the top features you’ll use as part of your VoIP business tools if you have a large or dispersed enterprise organization.
Understanding Enterprise VoIP Systems
Businesses can leverage VoIP with just a strong internet connection to make calls over their computer or another digital device. They may also have an analog telephone adaptor that looks like a standard phone handset, but which digitizes analog voice signals to transmit online. VoIP business tools allow companies to cut costs radically from traditional phone services. This makes them a popular option for small and startup organizations.
But enterprise VoIP systems take this technology to a more sophisticated level. Enterprise-level VoIP services are upgraded versions of the same technology used for business and residential VoIP solutions. Techopedia defines enterprise VoIP as “software that provides internet telephone capabilities specifically designed to fit the needs of large organizations.”
Enterprise VoIP offers advanced features and functionality to take the place of a corporate PBX (private branch exchange). These platforms can handle the call volume of a call center but still offer desk-to-desk calling, automated attendants, and even hold music.
One key to an enterprise VoIP system is the increased security to protect an organization’s secure communications. This could include:
- Voice over Secure IP (VoSIP)
- Secure Voice over IP (SVoIP)
- Secure Voice over Secure IP (SVoSIP)
Some of the add-ons to an enterprise-level VoIP solution over a small to mid-size business include:
- Better data encryption
- Private internal phone networks just like a PBX
- Customized call waiting, hold, and routing features
- Conference calling
- Multi-user functions such as chat and screen sharing
The power of the internet allows enterprise VoIP to evolve into more of a unified communications tool. This can be helpful to bring together large dispersed teams, which you might likely find in enterprise organizations. For these organizations, a PBX phone system is generally only a starting point for their business communications needs.
Today’s sprawling multi-billion-dollar companies require a more sophisticated solution to meet their needs. Enterprise organizations receive a much higher volume of call traffic than smaller businesses do—and this is certainly true if the organization leverages a call center for customer service or sales. These organizations often need more features for call management to help route and control the high volume of inbound and outbound calling. That’s why we see VoIP enterprise business tools offering everything from conference calling to call hold and forwarding, a unified inbox, and much more. If your organization is searching for an enterprise VoIP system, what are the top five features you must have to improve the business?
5 Features Your Enterprise VoIP System Must Have
Given the high volume of calls handled by an enterprise VoIP system, there are some increasing demands placed on these platforms that small companies simply will not need. Your enterprise VoIP system will likely offer these five features:
- Call forwarding
Americans are increasingly mobile. Most employees spend less than six hours a day at their desks, and that was before COVID-19, when a higher percentage of workers switched to working from home. Your workforce travels, attends meetings and conferences, and it appears that many will continue to work from home long after COVID is over. This requires that your enterprise VoIP system have the flexibility to route calls wherever your worker may be. One of the best features of an enterprise VoIP platform is the call forwarding feature that allows your employees to forward calls to any number. From a practical perspective, this means employees can field calls from wherever they’re working that day. That makes enterprise VoIP the perfect model for teams that are on-the-go – and these days, that’s just about everyone.
- Customizable user templates
When enterprise organizations had traditional phone service with an onsite PBX, adding and subtracting users was laborious, expensive, and required the help of a specially trained telephony technician. An enterprise VoIP system allows you to easily add and remove users, manage phone lines, and add features.
Think about how efficient this is; large organizations can add or terminate hundreds of employees a year. Each new hire needs a phone line. But from an admin portal, you can easily manage user profiles, which makes onboarding and offboarding a lot more efficient. The customized and easy-to-use enterprise VoIP system also allows you to customize user privileges, giving you much more control over employee access.
- Interactive voice response (IVR)
Any company can benefit from an IVR. However, the larger you grow, the more you need the powerful automation that comes with this feature. An IVR allows you to tailor your response to callers with menu features to direct their calls, saving you and your customers time. This automation creates a more seamless and professional response every time and for every caller. - Inexpensive long-distance calling
When an enterprise company moves its telephony to the cloud, the impact on its bottom line is enormous. An enterprise VoIP system eliminates domestic long-distance charges and cuts international calling fees. If you have a call center or a sales team, you understand immediately the impact this could have on your overhead costs. For a multi-location business, the cost savings multiply. - Integration with other software platforms
Finally, it is the integration with other software platforms that makes enterprise VoIP so valuable to companies seeking to improve employee efficiency. As organizations grow, they often continue to add software platforms to perform the various functions necessary for each department in the organization. Over time, these disparate platforms become a patchwork, so redundancies in workflows and tasks are almost inevitable. But an enterprise-grade VoIP communications system should be able to build out any software integration that you require. Cloud technologies can build bridges between online applications with powerful application program interfaces (APIs). This allows your enterprise VoIP to bring all of these tools together into a unified approach to your organization’s communications.
We can help your enterprise organization achieve these benefits—and more. Talk with our team today about your options.