What is hosted calling for businesses?

Business hosted calling involves phone calls managed through a company’s own phone system rather than an external provider. This can offer businesses numerous benefits, such as greater control over call quality and features, lower costs, and increased flexibility.

What Are the Benefits of Hosted Calling for Businesses?

There are several advantages that hosted calls can offer businesses, including:

  • Greater control over call quality and features: When businesses host their own calls, they have more control over the quality of the call and the features available. This can ensure that calls are clear and concise and that customers have access to the features they need.

Simplified Management

Getting started with VoIP is simple. All you need are phones and a cable to connect them to your network. We’ve even noticed that many customers opt for softphones and no longer use physical phones. Connecting your business to hosted VoIP services requires minimal internal expertise and skills.

Benefits for Contact Centers

For businesses offering phone-based customer service, Hosted VoIP is suitable for the needs of a contact center of any size—from a handful of customer service representatives to hundreds of agents operating 24/7.

With a hosted VoIP provider that supports contact center needs, you can benefit from:

  • Unified Communications (UC): UC enables your colleagues to communicate with customers via phone, chat, email, and more.
  • Reporting and Monitoring: Many VoIP services for contact center solutions provide easy access to the statistics and insights you need to make smarter decisions about staffing and training.
  • Interactive Voice Response (IVR): Allowing customers to state their question can quickly connect them to the right department or person.
  • Smarter Call Routing: VoIP offers extreme flexibility in routing, allowing you to optimize incoming call traffic.

Add-On Features

Hosted VoIP is flexible and can be tailored to your needs. Some brand-new startups may require minimal features to start as cost-effectively as possible. Larger, established enterprises may seek as many features as possible for more integrated communication.

Regardless of where you fall on this spectrum, partnering with a hosted VoIP provider that offers a full suite of VoIP add-on features can transform your business communication. A few popular add-ons to consider include:

  • Data Integration: Voicemail-to-email transcription
  • Automated Call Distribution: For contact centers or high call volumes
  • Interactive Voice Recognition: Smarter call routing using built-in system intelligence
  • Remote Management: Web-based administration for adding phone lines
  • Chat: For internal and external communication, which can be integrated with your CRM tool
  • Video Chat and Teleconferencing

Flexibility and Scalability

With VoIP, you can easily add phone lines within minutes, often directly from the management portal, at a fixed monthly rate. All you need is a web browser and the ability to make a few clicks. The flexibility and scalability of VoIP are ideal for businesses with seasonal staffing fluctuations or those experiencing rapid growth.

Data Integration

Creating a positive “customer experience” means integrating your communication across different channels. This could mean bringing together social media, phones, email, voicemails, chat, and all other methods your customers use to communicate.

By choosing a VoIP service that integrates with your customer relationship management tool, you can gain insights into every interaction a customer has with your business. This can include:

  • Voicemail-to-email transcription
  • Mobility
  • Chat
  • Social media messages

Unified Business Communications Capabilities

You may not be ready for unified business communications today, and that’s okay. With a VoIP provider offering a full range of business tools, you can make the leap when you’re ready. By consolidating phones, additional services, internet connectivity, and data on one network, you can achieve:

  • Faster problem resolution
  • Higher employee productivity
  • Improved team collaboration
  • Better customer satisfaction through transparency
  • Enhanced customer service

Cost Savings

The cost-saving potential of VoIP is immense. While there are some initial investment costs for devices, you can pay a fixed rate per month for each user and add-on services. Researchers estimate that the average business saves 40% on hosted VoIP compared to analog, while companies with high international calling needs can save 90%.

Mobility

Although not all providers offer the same VoIP service add-ons, mobility is one of the most common benefits businesses leverage when switching to hosted VoIP. Depending on your provider and configuration decisions, you can:

  • Simultaneously ring desk phones and mobile phones
  • Unlock mobile call forwarding
  • Enable mobile failover in case your internet goes down

Customer Service

Simply put, customers love VoIP. The right interactive voice recognition system can reduce the feeling of being “bounced around” from representative to representative, allowing them to speak directly with the right person. It also means higher call quality and faster answers to questions with the right add-on features.