As you are here, you must be looking for an optimized communication system to maintain rapports both internally and externally. How to save time and effort and to avoid getting drown in high-tech information? Either you are a brand new startup or would like to switch, expand, upgrade, downgrade your current communication system, you are at the right place!
Define the best phone system for your business
First thing first, what makes the best phone system?
Actually, you don’t have to be a telecommunications expert, or hire an expensive consultant to come to analyze your business’s needs to help choose the ultimate phone services. It’s pretty simple if you get off to a flying start.
There are a number of factors to consider, such as how you want to tailor the system, what kinds of connection you prefer, whether the cost is reasonable, if it has all of the features you want or offers collaboration tools that suit your business, and provides the mobility tools…
In other words, a best phone system will fit your business perfectly. It is the one that not only fits your planning budget, but also offers the features you may need when business expands, and customized options to meet your specific needs.
What are your options?
When your business is small, you can easily get by with one telephone line. However, as your business expands, you need to add more phones for staff who may be located in oversea offices, or move around frequently, things can get complicated.
In currently fast changing world, business phone systems have become much more flexible. Traditional phone systems are no longer dominant but have been digitized to catch up with other modern types. PBX systems, once referring to complex networks, have gone hosted as well. This means you have many options to consider than ever.
Let’s take a closer look at these two popular phone systems to give a thorough assessment.
Traditional Private Branch Exchange (PBX)
With more phone lines, and more phone numbers, both customization and expense will grow. Luckily, there’s a sophisticated equipment that can manage this situation—PBX, or “private branch exchange”. It helps you connect all the phones in a company, or across multiple locations, together. When considering PBX for your business, take into account the following pros and cons:
A PBX can accommodate your businesses with multiple locations as a stable and independent infrastructure.
Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP)
The other option is VOIP, a technology that allows you to make voice calls using a broadband Internet connection instead of a analog phone line. VOIP is now more application-based, transitioning from hardware systems to softwares that is leased in a cloud model. The pros and cons are:
In this cloud era, businesses needed to invest their own infrastructure to host an advanced on-premise phone system. And why not, with prices lower, features greater and choices more abundant it should be the way to go?
Which system do we recommend?
As a matter of fact, the definition of a PBX phone system has transformed since the rise of VoIP technology. Hosted and virtual PBX phone systems—also known as cloud-based PBX, have made up for physical hardware obsolete in many cases and small businesses can also leverage its benefits through the cloud.
Hence for most growing businesses, we recommend using a cloud-based PBX phone system from a provider like ZONE. The most obvious competency of VOIP must be the availability of most features you expect for your business, but without the costly initial hardware and installation costs of a traditional or IP PBX.
A cloud PBX only requires a sufficient internet connection and phone handsets which is optional as you can also use mobile phones or desktop softphones to save the cost. All of phone system’s features, such as the auto attendant, phone tree, and voicemail boxes are managed online. This also has the additional benefits of making the system highly scalable, since you can add and remove extensions at any time.
As your office grows beyond 30 or 40 employees, however, either cloud-based PBX or IP PBX would be suitable for you. Because of the big number of phone extensions, there’s not much difference between investing in the costly one time IP PBX maintenance, setup fee and monthly subscription fee. Both will be able to bring cost savings in management, maintenance, and affordable call rates, plus add-on cost benefits and efficiencies.
Finally, your choice!
In a nutshell, IP telephony is proven to be the promising future of human communication and its benefits are so clear that you don’t even need to consider the traditional PBX.
We hope this post have helped you evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of PBX versus VoIP to find out which is the best fit for your business as well as ensure that precautions are taken.
If you’re interested in getting a cloud-based PBX phone system for your business, take a look at the related article below or contact us. You will see a range of plans that let you pick the phone services you need to give your enterprise the flexibility and big business image you’re looking for.