Common Mistakes to Avoid When Choosing a Business VoIP Service

VoIP phone systems can be combined with other systems, such as your customer relationship management (CRM) or help desk system, thanks to their versatility. These connections might assist you in searching your call records for fresh information about the attitudes of your clients and the demographics of your target market. VoIP services are quite flexible and provide a plethora of capabilities for business customers to take into account, but what ratio of features and cost should you be looking for?

The simple answer is: Move cautiously, do your research, and don't base your decision just on price if you've decided to switch to a VoIP service but aren't sure where to start. There are many wonderful business VoIP phone systems available, but picking one can be challenging because they all have distinct features and price points.

The simple answer is: Move cautiously, do your research, and don't base your decision just on price if you've decided to switch to a VoIP service but aren't sure where to start. There are many wonderful business VoIP phone systems available, but picking one can be challenging because they all have distinct features and price points.

Trikon Link is one of our top picks from our most recent roundup, but there are still many other great options available. In contrast to Trikon, which stands out for its adaptability and deployment possibilities, other systems may concentrate on distinct capabilities with a specialization in call center features.

To assist you in choosing among the business VoIP players, we've put together this list.

Know Your Rates

Your company's "right-hand man" is your business phone system. Focusing on the cost of the advertised services and assuming that the lowest cost reflects the best deal would be a serious mistake. It's crucial to be aware of any unstated fees because they have the potential to dramatically raise the price of services. Look at all potential solutions, such as conventional, hybrid, and cloud choices, as well as all associated expenses.

When browsing VoIP providers, try to find a solution that combines great quality with affordable pricing to give you the best of both worlds. For instance, a solution might be expensive but not necessitate new hardware or software expenditures, which lowers maintenance expenses. Generally speaking, be sure to factor in the price of installing, maintaining, and upgrading a system in addition to figuring out the total cost of ownership.

When browsing VoIP providers, try to find a solution that combines great quality with affordable pricing to give you the best of both worlds. For instance, a solution might be expensive but not necessitate new hardware or software expenditures, which lowers maintenance expenses. Generally speaking, be sure to factor in the price of installing, maintaining, and upgrading a system in addition to figuring out the total cost of ownership.

Look for Versatile Dialing Options

One of the best things about VoIP phone systems is the variety of call-making options they provide. Their most fundamental purpose is to simulate a conventional PABX, where employees make and receive calls using the most basic handsets and headsets. While some VoIP systems allow you to connect your current phones, others sell elegant VoIP phones with additional functionality.

Softphones are an additional dialing option that is exclusive to VoIP phone systems. A softphone is exactly what it sounds like: software that runs on your computer and mimics phone functionality by connecting a microphone and headset or speakers. Many of these apps provide functionality that a typical phone system would not provide, such as calendar integration, team messaging and collaboration, and the ability to transmit as well as receive files during a call.

Portable business phone systems take it a step further. Field workers frequently require the entire spectrum of communications functions to be available on their mobile devices. Regrettably, not all VoIP service providers offer mobile softphone apps with the same value and services as their desktop programs.

The majority of the systems we tested include both Apple iOS and Google Android mobile apps, but their quality and feature sets vary. If a call is not answered, the mobile app may be unable to compile call records or transcribe voicemails. There's an industry-wide push to make mobile softphone programs as feature-rich and powerful as their desktop versions, but it's important to test these for your specific mobile device deployment.

Don't Ignore Collaboration Features

Full-featured VoIP services enhance their speech capabilities with a variety of collaboration technologies that allow your employees to meet, interact, and work together online. Users can access these features via a unified communications client or through separate apps provided by the VoIP provider or through third-party integration. SMS texting, video conferencing, and online meeting collaboration are all basic choices.

However, as the market matures, you'll see offerings with either extra features or more evolved interpretations of the fundamentals. Online meeting collaboration and video conferencing, for example, generally feature the option to share the screen to deliver a presentation or conduct a software demo. Latest interpretations, on the other hand, may incorporate the capacity to allow every call attendee to annotate a shared document and maintain track of participation and versions. Integrations for scheduling and calendars are also prevalent, with a common directory service serving as the hub.

Advanced services include customization options that enable you to combine certain capabilities of the base VoIP platform with those achieved through third-party integrations (more on this in a bit).

Understand Call Management

As VoIP phone systems evolve, their feature sets become more customized to certain users. That means that even products that compete directly with one another may not have the same capabilities. If your company is investing in VoIP service because of its software, make sure that the needs of the company are included in the solution. Call management is one area that requires special attention as it is a crucial element in telecommunication.

Assume you have a high volume of calls that come into a specific set of phone numbers (such as a service desk) or that strike the system at a specific time of year. In that instance, call queuing may be required, in which the VoIP phone system automatically distributes calls across extensions depending on availability, geography, or other parameters. Another example is extension management, in which the system allocates extensions to particular users and controls a name directory that interfaces with the network directory of your IT department.

Plan for Third-Party Integration

One of the primary benefits of VoIP service is its ability to link to other business systems, particularly for high-end systems known as UCaaS. Because these systems are software, they frequently include a list of pre-built connectors with whatever apps the manufacturer believes their consumers will prefer. Trikon LINK, for example, includes a plethora of extensions, such as Dropbox, and Google Drive.

Customers can use these extensions to create custom workflows to help them operate more efficiently. An incoming client phone call, for example, may activate the softphone within the helpdesk app. The service representative may take the call and, as is customary, write out a trouble ticket, which is then saved as a document file and connected to the ticket number in the database. However, as part of the integration, you may also save an automatic recording of the call as a WAV file that is connected to both the ticket text file and the ticket number, so that whenever this ticket record is accessed, both of those files display as supporting documentation.

If this excites you, check for vendors who support integration APIs. These will typically adhere to the REST standard, which has become a popular method of integrating cloud services.

Don't Settle for Second-Class Support

The amount of customer support you receive, as with other products, is critical to how well your VoIP service operates. Trikon, for example, provides phone support 24 hours a day, seven days a week for clients with plans for two or more people. If you're a single user, you'll only be able to get someone on the phone during 13-hour periods from Monday to Saturday.

Another popular alternative is live chat. Several vendors provide live chat help 24/7. If you manage a multinational company with 24-hour needs, you'll want to choose a service provider who can ensure your questions will be answered swiftly.

However, exercise caution while adding features to your business phone system, particularly in the case of the customized integrations discussed above. They may be appealing, but you can expect your pricing to rise. Also, just because your vendor provides exceptional customer service does not imply that the vendor with whom you've linked your VoIP does. Even if they do, it's unlikely they'll support an integration mechanism created by a customer.

Explore each component of your overall VoIP phone system to ensure that you understand who to call when to call, and why. Also, if you're planning to create custom integrations, you should check premium support options. Yes, it costs more money, but having professionals on hand throughout both development and day-to-day operations may pay tremendous returns.

Don't Compromise on Security

Every cloud-based service that is integrated into your organization must pay close attention to security. Every day, new attack vectors emerge. Comprehensive security precautions are even more important for an internet-connected application like VoIP, which serves as the hub of your corporate communications. Perform due diligence on providers to determine who is responsible for data that traverses their cloud-based services, and negotiate security terms into your contract if possible.

Look for services that provide end-to-end encryption, both during transit and at rest. Look for advanced authentication options as well, particularly multi-factor authentication and biometrics. Such precautions are necessary since an increasing number of cyber-attacks explicitly target VoIP phone systems.

Communicate with your IT personnel to ensure that security is a priority for them as well. Check to see if your on-premises networking hardware supports VoIP service and has business-grade security capabilities, and then make sure they're enabled where they should be. For example, virtual LANs (VLANs(Open in a new window)) are frequently used to separate VoIP traffic since having a dedicated network for voice traffic ensures that data from other network programs do not interfere with call quality. However, VLANs can also be used to secure VoIP calls if they are configured correctly by IT.

Explore each component of your overall VoIP phone system to ensure that you understand who to call when to call, and why. Also, if you're planning to create custom integrations, you should check premium support options. Yes, it costs more money, but having professionals on hand throughout both development and day-to-day operations may pay tremendous returns.

Unify Your Communications

As previously said, your VoIP service provider can also be a one-stop shop for all of your communications needs, and the majority of them have incorporated this feature under the banner of unified communications as a service (UCaaS). This entails combining chat, conference calls, emails, phone calls, video calls, and voicemail into a single app. All of the services we looked at gave some sort of this service, but not all VoIP providers handle it the same way. There is some functional overlap with team messaging apps, which began as practical tools for organizing text messages and document collaboration but have since expanded to handle phone and video-conferencing activities as well.

Genuine platforms and business phone services offer extensive unified communications capabilities across all channels, as well as smart meeting spaces and other collaborative tools. More software-oriented providers, such as dial pads, will offer more powerful and highly unified softphones, but they will not be as easily able to integrate hardware phones. Finally, low-cost vendors may not provide any unified communications services or may only provide one or two additional channels such as fax and text.

Every organization's needs are distinctive, as are the ways they choose to connect with internal and external contacts. You don't need to worry if all you use is voice; however, in this day and age, a company that uses voice is essentially a unicorn. Every company communicates through many channels, and having a unified system implies that those channels may be used more efficiently. A VoIP phone system is a future for all business communication needs in every organization, all you have to do is choose the right VoIP service provider.