Choosing the Right Business Telephone Systems For Your Company

The rise of social media and the continued popularity of electronic mail have added new tools for businesses to utilize in order to achieve swift and effective communication. Still, the telephone remains a force to be reckoned with in the realm of business communications.

Which business telephone systems provide the most bang-for-your-buck and act as the greatest revenue generators for your company? Let's take a look at the two main kinds of setups.

Landline Business Telephone Systems

A public switched telephone network (PSTN), or landline system, is an analog-based phone system that remains a mainstay for a number of small businesses. Instead of relying on an Internet connection, landline systems simply utilize existing, "old-school" copper wiring that was long ago set in place by telephone companies.

The benefit of landline (PSTN) systems? Time-tested reliability. These systems have been around forever, and there is plenty of infrastructure everywhere to support companies of all sizes. Familiarity is the landline system's best friend, even in the face of more advanced systems. Since companies are well-versed in the simple, albeit limited, functionality of landline systems, many opt to continue using this copper wire-based solution. Use of PSTN systems requires no new training, which is seen as an attractive short-term cost-saving and timesaving solution for some businesses.

However, there are a number of drawbacks to using a landline system. Over time, it can be expensive to maintain private branch exchange equipment that's required to swap between all the separate phone lines within a business. On-site appointments occasionally must be made in order to troubleshoot problems with the private branch exchange system.

Additionally, PSTN systems don't offer some of the advanced functionality of VoIP (Voice-over Internet Protocol).

Voice-over Internet Protocol (VoIP) Business Telephone Systems

An increasingly common alternative to landline (PSTN)-based business telephone systems are Voice-over Internet Protocol (VoIP) systems, which provide advanced features that standard landline systems cannot, or at least not without the expensive inclusion of private branch exchange equipment.

VoIP systems level the playing field and create the opportunity for small businesses to easily attain advanced telephone functions that were previously reserved only for larger entities. This is achieved through VoIP's use of standard, high-speed Internet connections that nearly all businesses everywhere already utilize to browse the Internet.

There are a number of differences between the features of landline and VoIP phone systems that trend in VoIP's favor. Aside from the features offered by a landline, VoIP boasts the built-in ability to offer call queues, conference calling, instant messaging, video messaging, unified messaging, Interactive Voice Response (IVR), send-to-email-inbox voicemail solutions, and even the ability to turn computers into virtual phones. It's important to reiterate that all these features don't require any additional investment from businesses. They come standard.

There are a couple of notable drawbacks to a VoIP setup. VoIP requires that a company utilize a high-speed, broadband Internet connection. However, such a requirement realistically is no longer an unusual stipulation in today's business and consumer technology world. Additionally though, VoIP's are also prone to going down because of their reliance on the Internet. If your business's Internet goes down, so does your phone system, unless you pay extra for a Call Continuity feature that routes your call to another number automatically upon experiencing a service outage.

Regardless of the risk for service outage, the benefits of VoIP over a traditional system are admittedly varied and extensive.

When researching business telephone systems, NJ companies can go to http://www.abcnj.com/VoiceOverIP.

VoIP Small Business Solution

Many small businesses tend to lag behind their larger counterparts in their use of new technology. Those that do may be doomed, not only to remain small and fail to realize the growth that their initial potential may have promised, but also to lag behind their smaller competitors. In fact a VoIP small business solution can not only save small businesses money, but also significantly increase their communications efficiency.

It is a proven fact that technology can contribute a great deal to growth, irrespective of the size of the company involved, and even a single VoIP network can give a small business a competitive edge.

Not only can a small business VoIP solution dramatically reduce the size of a phone bill to the company concerned, it can also help to reduce the phone bills of their customers. A VoIP subscriber can select any area code it wants to use, so that if the majority of their customers operate from New York, the business can offer these customers calls at the local rate, even if that business is located in Los Angeles.

In fact this type of small business solution to communication costs can allow them to offer toll free numbers to their more important customers, a service hitherto only economically feasible to larger companies. How's that for a competitive edge? In many businesses image is everything and this VoIP small business solution to competing with the big boys is a massive incentive to adopting this new technology.

This is not all that a VoIP small business solution offers, however. There is also the advantage that the provision of VoIP telephones to sales personnel allows them to communicate with head office, and every other company employee issued with a VoIP handset, free of charge irrespective of distance.

Because the VoIP small business solution to telecommunications, like all other VoIP applications, involves communication via the internet, such communication can be made using software and hardware suitable for IP use such as PC, laptop, palm computers, PDAs, Bluetooth and any other technology suitable for packetized internet transfer and reception. By use of VoIP small business solution technology, small businesses can at last compete with networked corporate companies in speed and flexibility of communication.

Conference calls integrating other web-based voice and video presentation technologies can be arranged at the click of a button, and customers can be impressed with corporate technology at small business prices.

A VoIP small business solution is available for any medium to small company structure, and simple networked systems can easily be incorporated due to the intrinsic internet and web-related technologies involved. This makes facilities available to small businesses which previously had been the domain only of the large corporations that could afford them.

With a customized VoIP small business solution, companies of any size can tick off communication as one more step towards not only competing with large corporations, but getting ahead of their peers with respect to communications efficiency, image and speed of response to requests and inquiries.

After all, if you can communicate with a colleague in Japan quicker and at lower cost than your competitor can with Boston, what chance does he have? A VoIP small business solution designed specifically for you can achieve this as standard – it is not an expensive option!

Peter Nisbet is an industrial chemist with a great interest in internet file transmission and reception systems and runs many websites including http://www.data-voip-solutions.com where many aspects of VoIP services and systems are discussed.

That Healthy Economy

From the business section of today's New York Times, a report on Silicon Valley that may be a sign of where we are going: venture capital investments are up, profits are healthy, R&D funding is booming, and the job situation still sucks.

Why? Productivity improvements. Companies are doing more with less. That means, no, there are a not a bunch of new jobs to go with all this good news, and life in the San Jose area continues to get tougher for the middle class.

(The article notes offshoring, everyone's favorite demon since it started affecting educated technology workers; we weren't too upset when it was just manufacturing jobs, so now a modest outsourcing trend that affects higher-income people get a lot more attention than a much larger trend at the lower end of the income spectrum.)

It's a sobering report for those who are convinced that keeping businesses healthy means good things for everyone.