Hosted Business Phone Systems provide the flexibility and scalability businesses require today.
Nowadays business is done at lightning pace and it can be difficult to keep up with your competitors without a greater degree of flexibility throughout your organisation which allows you to respond quickly to changes in your market place, adopt new technology and take advantage of new employment opportunities. One area in which the employment market in the UK has changed rapidly is flexible working. According to a recent CBI survey, more than 60% of UK companies have employees that work remotely and 14% of the UK workforce work from home. If your key business infrastructure is not agile enough you may have difficulty supporting the shift to remote and flexible working.
Scalability
For many businesses, scalability is one of the most important attributes a system, service or product can provide and this gives your business the ability to respond to changes more quickly. The best business communications solutions place great emphasis on scalability allowing you to cope with sudden change easily, such as a site move, a split in operations between multiple sites, the deployment of remote workers to cover extended operational hours and a surge in call traffic due to a successful marketing campaign for example.
Traditional Service Shortcomings
Most fixed line business telecoms solutions tend to offer very limited scope to scale up without significant costs and other considerations such as long lead times which do not suit most businesses in a fast-paced business environment. Whereas hosted solutions offer much greater flexibility, allowing you to manage increased requests for mobile and flexible working, the addition of new sites and peaks in demand due to seasonal variability for example. Traditional telecoms solutions are not flexible enough to cope with fast-paced change and rapid business growth. If your business is on a tight deadline to deliver a new retail outlet for example can you afford to wait weeks, even months sometimes to install new ISDN lines and get the new site connected? Would it also be much better if you had complete control of your business communications solutions so you do not have to rely on 3rd parties to manage this for you and be subject to their timescales? Traditional telecoms solutions tend not to provide fast service delivery nor do they give you the control you need and that’s why more UK businesses of all sizes are considering hosted business phone systems to give them the agility and control they need to run their businesses more efficiently.
Service Resilience
Traditional phone systems and lines can also present additional challenges as they tend not to provide a level of resilience needed for most UK businesses these days. If either your phone lines or phone system develop a fault and depending on the response and fix times related to your services it could be hours, days or even weeks before you fully recover and can you afford any downtime at all considering the lost calls and potential lost revenue? Hosted phone systems are designed with business continuity in mind allowing you to easily redirect calls to alternative sites or telephone numbers as part of a pre-planned disaster recovery plan or on an ad-hoc basis.
Prepare for Change
Hosted telephony can not only meet your changing business needs for speed of service delivery, flexibility and scalability but can often deliver a more cost-effective communications solution than traditional predecessors. A hosted solution also removes the hassle of managing your own standalone phone system while leaving you in control of your business telecoms. Change is inevitable for most businesses and whilst you cannot avoid it you can certainly prepare for it. Choosing a hosted communications solution will provide the agility you need to cope with whatever is thrown your way.
