Will Kelly

I’ve been doing a lot of reading and research about telephony lately and came across and liking the developments I am finding on the mobile and cloud fronts. Cloud telephony is worth checking out if yourorganization that still depends on their old-school telephone Ma Bell telephone system in the the dusty old PBX closet  for conducting customer and other important business calls. Even if you’ve taken the extra step of putting VoiP system onsite, cloud telephony can help save you money and offer a lot of flexibility while improving your customer facing communications. Let’s look at some reasons why you need to pay attention to cloud telephony:

Cost savings: Cloud telephony offers significant cost savings over traditional VoIP and POTS lines. Moving your phone system to the cloud eliminates the infrastructure and maintenance costs of on-premise hardware and means you never have to deal with expensive telephony technician visits. Further, you only buy the phone services you need.

Scalable and flexible infrastructure.  Your business is fluid and your phone system needs to accommodate that reality. Cloud telephony’s scalable and flexible infrastructure is perfectly suited for growing businesses because they don’t have to buy more services than their businesses require. Because it’s all delivered over the web, cloud telelphony makes it easy to bring new branch offices and remote teleworkers onto your phone system. You can scale up and down more easily and economically without the hassles your old phone company would normally throw at you.

Roll your own phone system. Old Ma Bell phone systems were more a disruption than a productivity tool. With a cloud telephony system, you can add new features like voicemail to email and call forwarding to smartphones that improve employee productivity. Better yet, you can try out and add these features as budget and business requirements dictate. Adding and deleting users and features can all be done from the comfort of a web interface because your PBX closet has been repurposed to other functions. Tailored telephony applications are a business equalizer. You can build business apps on top of cloud telephony systems.

Because your phone system is offsite, you can support users in their home offices or on mobile devices regardless of their location, meaning work can continue during a natural disaster like the recent hurricanes and east coast earthquake. It can also help you attract and retain workers through telework programs while communicating to your customers through a seamless telephone presence. Cloud telephony’s benefits are especially compelling in today’s down economic times when all of us are trying to do more with less and cast a wide as possible new for new business.Your CFO is going to like it. Your employees are going to like it. Most of all, your customers are going to like it. Now will you pay attention to cloud telephony?

Has your organization made the move to cloud telephony? Share your experience in the comments.

Image by Flickr user: Informatique.