Myth: If the internet goes down, so do my phones.
True…but false!
Okay, this one is tricky. When you use a cloud VoIP system and you lose internet, your phone system will stop working because it uses your LAN and the internet to connect calls. If it can’t “see” the internet, it won’t make the calls.
Let’s make things worse. Thinking about your current system, what happens if there’s construction near your business, and a backhoe cuts all your current landlines? Now you’re down for a day or maybe even a week, right?! Alright, so let’s go back to cloud phone service. If your internet goes down and true cloud VoIP is installed with the expectation that your internet might fail someday, you will never miss a customer’s call. Since the inbound calls are “in the cloud”, they are being processed in redundant data centers and unimpacted by your local outage. VoIP features like find-me-follow-me allow you to have your desk phone simultaneously ring your cell phone. So rather than taking your call from the desk, you take it from your cell and your customer doesn’t know the difference. On the old system, that’s missed revenue and a missed opportunity, but with cloud VoIP, you retain the customer! One more thought on this. If you install a cellular backup internet for your VoIP phones to failover to (in the event your primary internet goes down), you may still use the physical phones at your business.
Myth: Cloud UCaaS is expensive compared to an onsite PBX phone system.
This one can be true depending on the vendor you engage.
After surveying thousands of non-VoIP businesses, most would say they don’t want the upfront costs of completely changing the phone system, and perhaps even prematurely. At SpectrumVoIP, we’ve paid very close attention to this concern, and we couldn’t have made it easier to switch. In literally almost every case, we can become your new service provider, including all the phones and hardware, including the installation, setup, training, and maintenance, and do all that for less than what you’re paying your current phone service company just for service. Imagine getting a brand new, state-of-the-art phone system with unlimited features and unlimited usage in the US, Canada, and Mexico, and all you have to do is START WRITING A SMALLER CHECK EACH MONTH??! True story.
Myth: If it isn’t broke, don’t fix it.
True for most things…but not here!
We get it. Your phones do what you need them to do, they’re rarely a problem, and “you’re good”. Not true according to your competition! It doesn’t matter the age of the business, the unusual nature of your business vertical or if there are no savings to be had…your competition is beating you at your own game if they’re using VoIP and you aren’t. Staff that uses VoIP technology are happier with their experience, and they’re way more efficient. Mobility and collaboration features allow your staff to stay connected to your customers and peers even while working from home or on the road. Meanwhile, leadership teams and management enjoy watching the contact center metrics of how their staff is using the phones. Why is this important? It paints a beautiful story of your phone system’s health and culture, tracking metrics like calls handled, talk time, call queue and hunt group stats, all inbound and outbound stats on users, calls transferred, sent to voicemail, abandoned calls…you get the idea. You know exactly who’s working and how hard. You might even find out you can’t handle the volume of incoming calls, or that your customers are having a terrible phone experience!
Still doesn’t apply to you? While the rest of the world switches to VoIP practically overnight, analog phone service companies are retiring the technology altogether. In less than a year or two, analog technology will cease to exist because it’s hard to maintain, it’s too expensive to replace failing infrastructure, and VoIP is lightyears ahead with its power, functionality, and efficiency.
Myth: I have to get a new phone system if I switch to VoIP.
Again, true but false.
If you really want to enjoy all the rich features of cloud-hosted VoIP, it is certainly best to get new VoIP phones. Almost all VoIP service providers sell the phones, creating a significant upfront cost that is generally not budgeted. At SpectrumVoIP there are no CAPEX events. We include the phones with the service that probably costs significantly less than the service you’re using today.
What if you just bought your new phone system and you don’t want or need new phones? Depending on the phone system you selected, we can still provide the same resilient cloud service via SIP’s or dial tone gateways, however the features you enjoy only go as far as the onsite PBX you selected.
Myth: Call quality has always been bad.
Can be true, but it isn’t because of the VoIP service!
In the early days of VoIP, call quality was rough because of internet latency and very slow speed options. A lot has changed over the past 27 years since VoIP was first deployed! The public internet infrastructure has taken leaps and bounds of technological improvement, allowing for US-based latency to be negligible, and internet speeds are off the charts considering what VoIP needs to sound great. So why would a company still experience poor Quality of Service (QoS) today? The simplest answer is either their LAN is using more bandwidth than what’s being provided, or they are not giving the phones data priority via traffic shaping. Once all the dials are tweaked and fine-tuned, you and your customer may enjoy the best HD voice quality that exists today!