Three reasons businesses should use VOIP for communications

By Partner Content on Small Business UK - Advice and Ideas for UK Small Businesses and SMEs

Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) is one of the oldest business technologies in the market – yet, it hasn’t gone the way of the floppy disk and typewriters. At the inception, VOIP was too much of a hassle because it requires both parties on the call to be online on a computer. More so, the call quality on VOIP calls of old was poor with broken messages, rapid interruptions and loss of service – worst part is that those calls were expensive.

It has come on lightyears since then. The figures speak for themselves: UK fixed voice service revenues totalled £1.30 billion in Q3 2023, while the UK VOIP market is expected to grow by £3.78 billion by 2026.

Necessity could well be the final push here. Every business will need to switch over to VOIP by the beginning of 2027. The Big Switch Off will see all landline connections switched off, so you’ll need a high-speed internet connection to make and take calls that aren’t on mobile. What’s concerning is that 45 per cent of businesses don’t know about it, with 62.1 per cent still using landlines.

To prevent any further umm-ing and ahhh-ing, here are three more reasons to make the move to VOIP.

Cheaper solution for making calls

Access to the Internet is more competitively priced these days and it is often offered as a complementary offer in many bundled packages. If you already have an internet subscription for your business, you can easily start using VOIP services without having to incur additional charges to keep a separate phone line.

The fact that you don’t need to maintain separate lines for phone calls and data means your business will have lesser operating costs. The average savings for a VOIP business are between 30 per cent and 50 per cent – much of which is saved on hardware costs. Businesses with lesser operational costs tend to have more competitive advantages in their ability to pass down the savings to their customers. Hence, you’ll see an improvement in your bottom line due to the cost savings from VOIP.

Virtual Landline has a variety of packages for different sizes of business, starting at £4.50 per month. Find out more here.

Make calls anywhere

The second reason businesses should consider using VOIP for communications is the fact that it allows you to make and receive calls anywhere. With conventional phone systems, your ability to connect with team members, suppliers, and customers is limited to the availability of phone lines. However, with VOIP services, you can easily connect with persons of interest inasmuch as you are connected to broadband internet connection even if the people are in different locations and different countries.

In addition, VOIP makes it easy to connect with team members who are offsite or on the field. Video conferencing and other call centre applications also provide you with an opportunity to stay on top of your business operations.

Using a virtual office system like Virtual Landline, staff can keep in touch how they want to, via audio calls, group chats and video calls. They might even want to record calls if one of your colleagues is on the go and wants to review the conversation when they’re back in the office.

User-friendly interfaces

Traditional business phone systems tend have some wonky phone switches but wonky phone switches are not quite as annoying an unintuitive user interfaces. You can imagine how it can be tricky to forward a call on a traditional phone system. More worrisome is the fact that those traditional phone systems have very poor customer support that could tire you out if you happen to forget the password to your voicemail or if you need tech support for the unending glitches.

VOIP service providers have systems that can be integrated into the web and mobile interfaces of businesses; hence, your employees don’t have to feel like that are travelling back in time to use wonky phone switches. VOIP communication systems can also be personalised to meet the need of individual users as opposed to traditional phone systems that mandates the use of one central setting.

Being able to take calls in an easy-to-use app means that your colleagues can still be in contact, even if they’re travelling.

Having a reliable VOIP system doesn’t just instil confidence from your employees. With high-quality calls, on-hold music and multi-language auto-attendant, customers will see your business as more professional with features like these.

Where can I find a VOIP?

One such platform is Virtual Landline. With Virtual Landline, you can buy a virtual phone number or a whole virtual office system, starting at £4.50 per month. Different packages are available, depending on the size of your business. Try Virtual Landline and experience how Virtual Landline can transform your business. 

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