Looking to overhaul your communication system? Want to cut your costs while boosting efficiency? To reduce your capital outlay while freeing employees up to work from anywhere? To gain more insight and control over the back end system while outsourcing the day to day hassles of upkeep and maintenance?
Whatever your main concern, switching to a cloud-hosted PBX System brings far-reaching benefits, right across the board. Here are 10 of the biggest.
1. Lower Initial Outlay
Have a strong, reliable internet connection? Great! You’re all set. Cloud hosted systems, by their very nature, come with minimal infrastructure demands – and that means far less capital expenditure for you at the outset. Plus, it means you don’t have to worry quite so much about the financial burden of switching or committing to a brand new way of working.
If for some reason your chosen PBX system doesn’t work out the way you hoped, you’re not saddled with tens of thousands of pounds’ worth of physical equipment that you’re obliged to keep using, because you’ve paid for it. You have far greater freedom to be nimble, to adapt – and to change your mind.
2. It Saves You Money Each Month
The cost savings don’t end with the initial expense on installing your system. Hosting your communications solution in the cloud also means that you don’t have to worry about paying for expensive repairs, or about equipment downtime and routine maintenance that often comes with managing all your tech in-house.
3. You Can Depend on It
Okay, all the cost savings and convenience factors in the world are pretty meaningless if your comms system doesn’t work – but a hosted PBX system is a hugely reliable option. You can depend on it to provide clear reception and to connect every call, and (especially compared to PSTN connections), lags, delays or drops in call quality are rare.
4. Someone Else Handles the Support Stress
As a general rule, PBX systems are managed by third party vendors. This is fantastic news if you don’t particularly want to handle the day-to-day hassle of IT maintenance, troubleshooting and comms support. Essentially, you have a dedicated team of outsourced specialists ensuring that everything keeps ticking over smoothly, allowing your IT teams to focus on bigger, more strategic projects to grow your business, instead of keeping it afloat.
And, of course, it means far more uptime for you. As the end customer, you just see the smoothly operating surface, rather than worrying about the swan’s feet frantically pedalling away underneath!
5. …But You Get to Keep an Eye on the Whole Picture
That’s certainly not to say that you lose control over the operation. Quite the opposite. By switching to an internet-based solution, you’re making it far easier to collect comprehensive data on what you do, improving your scope for analysis and helping to enact continuous improvements to your business.
What’s more, you essentially become an administrator of your entire phone service, right across the organisation, including multiples sites, offices and locations. You have the ability to adjust aspects like where calls are routed and voicemails are sent to, meaning you can make changes specific to your team’s need in order to boost efficiency.
6. There Are Great Backups in Place
One major benefit that’s often underestimated is this: cloud backups. With a physical or conventional phone based system, you either have no way of recording and storing the vast amount of information collected during corporate communications, or if you do, backing this up effectively is an arduous task. It might involve manual backups and downtime. It might involve huge servers or multiple hard drives that are vulnerable to physical disasters and accidents like fires, natural disasters or hardware crashes.
A decent cloud-based system, on the other hand, will often incorporate regular, automatic backups as standard. These are stored in multiple safe locations with straightforward restoring options to guarantee uninterrupted access, should the worst happen.
7. It’s More than Just a Voice Call Solution
Many businesses make the mistake of assuming that the only real benefits of PBX systems relate to voice calls. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Other communications features covered include remote call management, voice management, voicemail and fax to email tools, hold music, and so on.
8. It Helps You Be More Mobile
Cloud hosted PBX systems are ideal for companies that are trying to open up more flexible/remote working solutions and become more mobile overall.
Using your hosted PBX, you can hook up telecommuting workers or those based in disparate locations. They simply sign in and accept calls as usual, as if they were on site. Outgoing calls, too, are channelled through the company’s caller ID, meaning that clients and partners are none the wiser.
The benefits of this are far reaching. No more putting off an important customer because the person they need is out travelling to a distant meeting all day. Instead, you can simply bring them onto your office system using cloud PBX smartphone apps, allowing them to handle their calls on the road, without having to give out personal phone numbers.
9. It All Just Fits Together
Cloud-hosted PBX systems are excellent ways to integrate all the different strands of your communications. You connect the dots across different offices and locations, you bring remote workers in line with the company’s communications procedures, and you streamline your calling and voicemail across the organisation. So many headaches dealt with in just one new technology rollout!
10. It’s Easy to Scale
As I’m sure you know, one of the trickiest conundrums when selecting any new company-wide technology is this: how do you balance the limits of your budget with the need for a system that can grow as you do?
If you opt for a solution that only meets your current needs, how do you scale? And if you go the other way, planning for the needs of a much larger team, how ambitious do you go? How much investment is reasonable? And how do you know that, by the time you get to that size, this tech won’t already be obsolete?
This is where cloud-hosted PBX comes into its own. The awesome thing about cloud systems generally is that, because there’s minimal physical equipment, they typically operate on a subscription basis that can be sharply scaled up (or stripped back) at little warning to meet changing demands. It’s a highly responsive, flexible and adaptable way to do business – great news for your cash flow and your bottom line.
So, What Next?
If you’re looking to switch to a Hosted PBX system, or you want to move from your current supplier, just click here to arrange a Free Consultation and we’ll create a package tailored to your business needs.
