According to Ofcom, mobile phone take-up per household overtook fixed telephone lines as long ago as 2006, and now VoIP telephony (internet-based) is similarly supplanting traditional ISDN fixed lines in the business world.
Beneficial for businesses large and small, a private branch exchange (PBX) system, delivered as a hosted, cloud-based service, builds on this IP-based technology to give you a sophisticated phone system without the need for investment in premise-based equipment to control your calls and numbers.
Here are 10 top benefits of a hosted PBX system:
- Lower cost: there is a lower capital outlay as with an office-based telephony system because the service is hosted remotely by the service’s provider. Charged as a managed service, there are also no separate charges for repairs or maintenance as, except for the phones themselves at your office or in the hands of your staff, the rest of the equipment is situated at (and maintained by) the service provider.
- Faster deployment: as a cloud-based service, your hosted PBX can be deployed in a matter of days as opposed to weeks with a conventional office telephony installation.
- Multiple phone numbers: you can have as many numbers as you like connected to the one hosted PBX, so you can present a local presence to your customers without adding extra lines.
- Supporting growth: unlike a premise-based system, which may be limited by its capacity or the number of lines purchased, you can provision more extensions easily, so the system will grow with your business needs.
- Sophisticated features: Low cost does not mean low value. A hosted PBX system will support all the features of an onsite system and more, such as voicemail, voicemail-to-email, hunt groups, find-me / follow-me, directed call pickups, do not disturb, direct dial numbers, conference calling, call parking, hot desking and more.
- Flexibility: Your workers are not constrained to being in the office, as you can be connected to the same hosted PBX system whatever phone you are on (including mobiles) and wherever you are in the world (including overseas).
- Cheaper calls: VoIP call rates are very reasonable, particularly for overseas calls.
- Improved disaster recovery/back-up: a hosted PBX system ‘virtualises’ your office and so will give you flexibility of access from alternative sites or from even home, improving your organization’s resilience in case of any emergency or downtime at your office premises. Hosted services are provided from multiple sites providing high levels of resilience.
- Web-based: A smart hosted PBX system will come with a user-friendly web interface to allow you to manage users, groups, devices, numbers and much more, so that you have supervision and control of your telephony system at your fingertips, without having to resort to the system provider.
- Trusted partner: with a system such as Syntec’s SynPBX you are benefiting from the scale and expertise of an international telecoms provider handling all the call routing (switching) at our own hosted locations and responsible for managing all of the PBX equipment and software involved in the hosted PBX service.
The internet has transformed many facets of modern business life and telephony is no exception, so if you are reviewing your telephony needs, it is worth bearing in mind that a hosted PBX is probably best summed up as ‘tomorrow’s telephony system – today’!
