Hosted telephony is a telephone system that resides in the cloud rather than in your office. It doesn’t require ISDN channels. Instead, calls are made and received over an internet connection and are routed to fixed and mobile devices.
In recent years, hosted telephony has emerged as a popular choice for businesses. It covers all of your voice needs at a highly affordable price, with flexibility for your changing needs.
In this blog, we delve deeper into hosted telephony and the benefits for your business.
Before hosted telephony: PBX
Prior to hosted telephony, Private Branch Exchange (PBX) was the option for most business. It’s an on-premise phone system that routes the calls from your ISDN channels or analogue phone lines to your phones.
A PBX phone system allows organisations to have more phones than physical phone lines (PTSN) and allows free calls between users. With on-premise PBX phone systems, you are constrained to a maximum number of outside telephone lines (trunks) and to a certain maximum number of internal telephone devices or extensions. Users of the PBX phone system (phones or extensions) share the outside lines for making external phone calls.
There are setbacks to PBX. Most crucially, you are responsible for maintaining your telephone hardware, which requires budget and resource. As a result, there are high upfront costs, which can grow as you try to scale your systems as your business needs expand.
Due to these limitations, many businesses opt for the flexibility offering by hosted telephony.
Why hosted telephony is a superior alternative
Hosted telephony offers several significant advantages over traditional PBX systems, making it a more attractive option for businesses of all sizes. Here are the benefits you can expect to receive.
Cost-effectiveness
Unlike traditional PBX systems, hosted telephony is delivered as a cloud-based service, eliminating the need for businesses to purchase and maintain expensive hardware. Calls are usually inclusive of local, national and UK mobile numbers. This can reduce upfront and ongoing costs.
Hosted telephony providers typically offer predictable subscription-based pricing. This provides businesses with predictable monthly costs so they can avoid unexpected expenses and better plan their budget.
Scalability and flexibility
Hosted telephony systems can be easily scaled up or down to meet changing business needs, ensuring that businesses have the right number of phone lines and features at all times. This is ideal if your business is going through a growth period or your telephone needs fluctuate.
Even if you move office location, there is no impact to your phone systems and no additional set up costs.
Providers will often offer a wide range of features and customisation options, allowing businesses to tailor their communication system to their specific requirements. This gives you the flexibility you need to fully address internal needs.
Enhanced features
Hosted telephony solutions typically include a wide range of advanced features, such as call forwarding, voicemail-to-email, call recording and unified communications. These go beyond what you can expect from PBX.
You can also manage your own feature preferences, such as when to divert calls.
These features can help businesses improve productivity, enhance customer service and streamline their operations for better efficiency.
Reliability and support
Hosted telephony services are typically highly reliable, with providers taking responsibility for system maintenance and updates. This alleviates the pressure on your internal IT teams.
Instead, you’ll benefit from professional IT support and maintenance, ensuring that your communication system is always functioning properly.
Get powerful telephony with Microsoft 365 Business Voice
Microsoft 365 Business Voice is a powerful hosted telephony solution that integrates seamlessly with your existing Microsoft 365 applications, such as Teams, Outlook and SharePoint.
It has several key features to benefit your business, including:
- Teams calling: Make and receive calls directly from the Teams app on your desktop or mobile device.
- Call queues: Automatically route incoming calls to the appropriate team or individual.
- Auto-attendants: Create professional auto-attendants to greet callers and direct them to the right department.
- Call recording: Record calls for training, quality assurance or compliance purposes.
- Call forwarding and voicemail: Forward calls to another number or voicemail and access voicemail messages directly from Outlook.
Through these features, Microsoft 365 Business Voice enables unified communications, allowing businesses to manage all their communication needs. This includes voice, video and messaging, all within a single platform. Teams integration provides a central hub for collaboration, making it easy for teams to communicate and work together effectively.
By streamlining communication and collaboration, Microsoft 365 Business Voice can also help businesses improve productivity and efficiency.
Get started with hosted telephony
Hosted telephony is a flexible, cost-effective and easy-to-implement option for your telephone needs. With solutions like Microsoft 365 Business Voice offering advanced features, there’s never been a better time to switch from PBX to a cloud-based alternative.
If you are interested in learning more about hosted telephony, including how to successfully introduce it into your business with our expert help, visit our dedicated page.
