More and more companies are switching to voice over internet protocol (VOIP) systems to save money and boost their employees’ efficiency. If you have a small business and are considering making the leap, there are some ways you can get the best cloud hosted VoIP solution for your company.
- Talk to the people you know. If you know other business owners who have switched to a cloud hosted VoIP solution, ask them who they use and how they found them.
- Have a company come in and go a thorough check up on your network. When you are looking at your options for a cloud hosted VoIP solution, the first thing you need to do is make sure your network is working as well as it needs to. You may not notice problems with it when you are not using it for your phone communications but you will once you make the switch. The quality of your calls is important to your business and you need world-class phone solutions for your company. Doing an audit of your network can find problems that you should fix before you change over.
- You have more things to consider than just the bandwidth. Your cloud hosted VoIP solution will need a decent amount of available bandwidth but that is not the end of the story. Your connection needs to be steady and secure. Yes, you need the right upload and download speed but if your connection is super fast but then it drops out, you will drop your calls and that can be bad. When you are looking into this, find out about your internet service provider’s latency, packet loss and jitter rate. If there are issues with your internet connection, you will need to fix that before you switch over from traditional based phone systems.
- Ask about the connection from your business to your VoIP provider. There is only a small chance that your provider’s switch is not going to cross over other networks. The less hoops your signal has to jump through, the better the quality will be for your calls. You can run a trace route and then ping the SIP server and see how many routers your signal will have to traverse. This is not a static thing and will need to be tested more than once. Try at different times of the day to get a more accurate idea of what your signal will have to go through to get where it needs to go.
- Price is not everything. If you run your own small business, you are always on the look out for a good deal. That goes just as much for VoIP business systems as it does for office supplies. You should know that the cheapest cloud hosted VoIP solution may end up costing you a lot more in the long run. if they provide bad service, you can lose potential clients and customers when the service does not live up to their promises. At the same time, the most expensive service may not be the best. Some people live by the adage, “you get what you pay for.” That is sometimes true but it is not always the case. If you go with someone who is closer to the middle of the price pack.
- Pick a VoIP system that offers the services and features you need. There are a lot of options out there for small and medium sized business phone solutions so you should have no problem finding one that has the features and options you need for your cloud hosted VoIP solution. At the end of the day, it is more important to spend a little more money on a service that is good and gets you all of the features that you really need. If your staff is often out of the office doing events or showing real estate, you may really need the features that allow calls to be transferred to different phone numbers before going to voice mail.
Do your research and you will get the right VoIP system.
