By Robert Oscanyan
Apart from cost, there are numerous reasons why small businesses are leveraging technology to deliver better business results. The right phone system, for example, can spell the difference between failure and success for growing enterprises. Reliable communication, seamless coordination, and constant collaboration are critical to their growth. This is why businesses are making the decision to switch from their traditional legacy systems to a cloud-native digital solution like hosted VoIP.
Hosted VoIP empowers businesses with a flexible, scalable, and reliable way for teams to communicate and collaborate. To get a more in-depth understanding of what it can really do for your company, here’s a closer look at the real reasons why small businesses choose to use a hosted VoIP platform.
1. Small businesses want to adopt cost-effective solutions.
According to research, while business owners place a lot of value on technology, they are often apprehensive to try it out because of cost.
The survey consisted of 1800 small business owners. The respondent pool has 1,679 small businesses specifically identified as growth-oriented through participation in the 10,000 Small Businesses program (10KSB), along with a comparative random sample of 202 businesses by size and age criteria without any explicit growth identification (Control in the above graph).
In the study, 23% cite the cost of new technology as a barrier, followed by the cost of necessary upgrades and maintenance at 16%, and cost of training (including employee time) at 8%. Overall, nearly half of all respondents, at 47%, note cost-related issues as the biggest challenge they face for adoption.
This is why the cost efficiency of hosted VoIP has become one of the primary drivers of adoption for small businesses.
Small businesses striving to expand, want to adopt cost-effective solutions for their growing operational needs. Therefore, the ideal communications solution for them should be able to address all their communication needs and still deliver a significant amount of cost savings.
With hosted VoIP, businesses don’t have to shell out money to cover physical infrastructure and equipment. It follows a SaaS (Software as a Service) model, which means everything is deployed via the cloud. This also means that maintenance will be managed by the vendor. There’s no need to hire additional team members or IT staff, which helps significantly lower the monthly overhead costs of managing an internal communications system.
In addition, a hosted VoIP system allows businesses to make use of devices already being used in the workplace such as desktops, tablets, and smartphones. This eliminates investing in new desk phones given that communications can be done using existing tools available.
2. Small businesses need a flexible communication system that can scale according to their needs.
Small businesses have to be flexible. They should have the ability to respond to market opportunities and trends as they arise. To that end, a communication system that can match their need for flexibility is critical to their operations and growth.
Hosted VoIP is inherently designed to be scalable. It is designed to be nimble and easy to manage, no matter if you’re currently handling a team of ten and want to scale to a hundred. Since it’s a cloud-native platform that follows a SaaS model, vendors are able to provide tiered pricing models, or better yet, an all-inclusive per seat pricing model that can accommodate changing business needs easily. This makes it easy for the communication solution itself to keep up with a business’ growth as they expand or scale down to fit their current requirements.
So, let’s say a company needs to deploy a remote team as part of their growth plan, hosted VoIP solutions can easily accommodate this without sacrificing functionality. It also minimizes disruption to your current operations as you don’t have to wait for technicians to finish installing new hardware or equipment. Everything is handled and taken care of by your vendor.
3. Small businesses need enterprise-level functionality to keep up with bigger competition.
Competition is tough in any industry. Businesses are competing for market share, audience share, and customer loyalty as well as satisfaction. For most small businesses, one of the best ways they can differentiate themselves is by providing top tier customer service that is at par, if not better with their larger counterparts. Unfortunately, smaller enterprises can rarely afford the technological solutions that major corporations have access to, making it harder for them to stand out against the competition.
This is where hosted VoIP comes in. Hosted VoIP offers a robust selection of enterprise-level features and benefits that allow smaller businesses to keep up with major blue-chip corporations’ communication capabilities. From
4. Small businesses need to maximize employee productivity.
For the most part, small businesses have limited resources—especially when it comes to time. Smaller teams mean employees have to wear many hats in the organization. It’s not uncommon for someone to be managing operations yet still be required to travel around the city, if not the country, to meet with customers, clients, and stakeholders.
To that end, it’s important that small business employees have the necessary tools to maximize their time regardless of whether they are at their desks or not. They need to make sure their productivity isn’t dependent on a single location and that no matter where they are, they have access to all the tools they need to make sound business decisions.
Hosted VoIP has proven to be an essential tool that empowers this. With hosted VoIP, employees have centralized access to communication tools while they’re on the go. They don’t have to waste their time logging in and out of different apps just to stay in touch with the rest of the team. They also have powerful collaboration tools literally at their fingertips.
The bottom line?
Regardless of business size, communication and collaboration are essential to an organization. But it’s even more relevant for small businesses that are poised to grow. That said, when it comes to businesses that need the right communication tools to scale, hosted VoIP is definitely the way to go. No other solution offers the same level of efficiency, cost-savings, flexibility and scalability.
