The Top 6 Advantages of a VoIP 3CX PABX System

There are many advantages to switching to a 3CX VoIP telephone system such as, to decrease cost and improve resource management while increasing productivity.

It seems like there is a lot of information in circulation that contradicts itself with regards to VoIP telephony. Often this is because the traditional Suppliers still want to keep their clients on the older more traditional PABX Technologies. With any technology, it is a balance between Cost, Performance, Functionality and Service.

COST vs FUNCTIONALITY: Typically for a Traditional Telephony Solution, a business can spend $1000s per month on their phone systems. The more complex the requirement – Adding lines, IVR Services, Voicemail or number portability – the more cost that is incurred.

PERFORMANCE: We have come to expect a certain performance from the phone system and because traditional Telephony has been based on 1 wire for one phone the quality of the calls has been superior.

SERVICE: Unfortunately, the traditional Telephony Services provided are usually poorly supported for adds moves and changes. Support is usually very slow to occur, with complex fault finding and is more labour intensive and expensive. There is often a requirement for onsite technical rework or repair, or multiple visits to the telephone exchange to recable. This is especially the case with adding Phone numbers to your system.

Getting support and service from the Big Names can prove to be difficult. I know of a company who moved premises down the road and had to wait 5-6 months for the service to be transferred. The traditional solutions were typically ISDN dedicated fibre at a high cost, 36-month rental agreements, High-Cost Telephone calls.

In comparison, Computerisation and Voice over IP have taken Telephony down a new road, with the following benefits:

• HUGELY REDUCED COSTS
• COMPARABLE QUALITY TO TRADITIONAL PBX
• FASTER AND EASIER TO CONFIGURE AND SUPPORT
• ADDS MOVES AND CHANGES TO A SYSTEM DOES NOT REQUIRE ONSITE PROGRAMMING

It is also interesting that many of the Big Brand Telephony Companies including Telstra, Vodafone and Optus only supply traditional Voice services, or provide VoIP only through a Third-Party Operator. Over the last few years, VoIP Telephony has been of very low quality and performance in comparison to the older traditional carriers offering. This really is because of the LOW-Speed ADSL internet services that we have all had to suffer through.

Therefore, now is the best time to consider or reconsider VoIP Services because of the improvement that the NBN has provided allowing close to equity services now available from VoIP PBX Telephony vs traditional PBX Technology.

3CX VoIP can save you money and it has become cheaper because of a change in design that has occurred in the way Telephony works.

History Lesson: Traditional Telephony was Hardware and Cabling, it’s interesting to note the first Automatic Telephone Exchange was invented by a Funeral Director who was losing business to a competitor whose wife was in the manual exchange working (She was forwarding all the funeral business leads to her husband).

Anyway, the whole idea is to reduce costs, and this is what 3CX VoIP technology can achieve.

I mentioned that for every call there was a contention of 1-1, which means 1 phone call for one copper wire. 3CX VoIP allows us to packetised calls which works like traffic on a freeway. Homes and Businesses now have Internet connections that act like a freeway, with Internet searches, Streamed Video etc. being packetized and sent across a single internet connection. Therefore, everyone has been waiting for faster and wider freeways that can connect us to the WWW.

I believe we have now arrived at a point where 3CX VoIP is comparable to traditional Telephony in quality of what we hear on the phone. It will continue to improve and stabilise and now is the time to move to this type of service which can provide so many cost-saving benefits.

Quality of Service (QoS): Voice calls needs to be clear and crisp for every call. We expect voice packets to arrive on time with no traffic congestion. Email and browsing the internet don’t have the same Quality of Service requirement. Therefore, with 3CX VoIP QoS we now can prioritise voice traffic to arrive in preference, compared to other traffic, Just like the Bus Lane on the freeway.

We no longer require 1 copper wire for 1 phone call which was a very expensive technology.

If your business requires portability or has multiple locations, 3CX VoIP services can be of tremendous benefit to you because they will follow you wherever you go with the ability to pick up a call from a Smartphone, Desktop phone, Personal Computer or a Tablet device.

Do you think you could benefit from receiving a call from a client, then being able to automatically route that call to a remote worker, anywhere in the world on any device?

On a traditional phone system, a line that runs to a home or business is assigned its own phone number. Historically a phone number in Mt Lawley, for example, was prefixed with the EXCHANGE ID then followed by a number that referenced a certain cable linking to a house on a street.

Number portability was more difficult but now we can use Phone Numbers with no reference to a suburb or exchange.

We are working towards a system that does not tie a phone to an exchange location which requires contacting phone companies to transfer services and phone numbers to new locations.

With a phone number linked to a VoIP phone system, all of this is eliminated. There are no physical limitations. You have the freedom to move as your business demands and still connect to any device anywhere.

3CX VoIP can create CALL FLOWS for incoming calls into your business, which can be routed in various ways, either to an extension, voicemail, voice to EMAIL just to name a few options. Using 3CX VoIP phone systems allows you to multi-task with the most tech-savvy devices, allowing you to be as productive as you can be. 3CX VOIP can be connected also to CRM applications on your PC to bring up and identify incoming callers and referencing them to a client in your database.

• 3CX VoIP can also receive FAXES to EMAIL
• 3CX VoIP can receive voicemail to email.
• 3CX VoIP can make a coffee? (Hey, 3CX make me a coffee… maybe future functionality…)
• 3CX VoIP can manage music on hold and voice prompts for incoming callers if there is a delay to answer calls.

Suppose you are on a call within a queue. Clients can leave voice messages or get a prompt for a call back once you have finished. You can read voicemail-to-text transcriptions that are sent directly to your email inbox.

You can forward messages and voicemail easily. If you receive an important message in a voicemail, you can forward that voicemail to three other people automatically.

These features and many more useful ones are available with 3CX VoIP phone systems. And because the service always goes with you, the features you find helpful can be added or subtracted easily. In short, 3CX VoIP telephone systems grow with your business.

VoIP Systems Reduce Costs, Improve Time Management, and Increase Productivity

Since all calls use a converged data network instead of dedicated phone lines, participating in conference calls are made much easier.

It was possible to take part in conference calls if your business using a traditional phone system, but typically there were extra costs incurred for extra features and you would have to pay for an additional service to host multiple callers for a conference. These services are native to the 3CX VoIP phone system. Instead of paying for something extra, you can take advantage of the ability to make conference calls as an added benefit to the service you already pay for.

Not only that, but 3CX VoIP services make video conferences much easier as well. With the move towards Home Offices, especially in the wake of the current Novel Coronavirus lockdowns, we are finding that face-to-face interaction with colleagues and clients is preferable to

voice-only conversations. Video Conferencing is much more manageable with 3CX VoIP phone systems.

Sure, you know we can do all these things with our personal mobile phones already. But all this functionality is now available through one unified business system.

In today’s global economy, businesses can be located anywhere. This used to mean that meetings required to travel. Even so, with a 3CX VoIP service, there is no reason to lose the ability to conduct important calls or to fail to forward essential calls or documents.

Many of us use Text Messaging now in preference to talking on the phone or leaving a voicemail. Everyone seems to be on the phone continually and leaving a message via text is proving to be a more effective way to converse without interrupting someone who is already talking on the phone.

We don’t have time or inclination to dial into a voice messaging service to retrieve a call. Especially now we can see who called us and when.

3CX VoIP not only has the ability to receive and make calls, included as we already mentioned there is video conferencing and also TXT messaging.

With a VoIP phone system, you can also choose where to divert your calls and how they can be answered. For instance, you might select the first few rings to be forwarded to your office. If you don’t answer the call, it will then be forwarded to a second or third device, for example, mobile phone or laptop. Quite simply, calls don’t need to be missed anymore if they are urgent.

Important documents that need to be forwarded no longer have to wait either. Using VoIP, business associates can e-fax their documents instead of waiting a day (or several) to get to a fax machine.

A common worry that surfaces about VoIP are the fact that if the internet stops working, so does the ability to make calls. This doesn’t have to occur under the right circumstances. The truth is that call-forwarding, like other features in VoIP phone systems, is incredibly flexible.

The capability to choose where your calls are forwarded, and how, means that you also don’t have to lose productivity because of local power outages or weather-related events. If the office phone can’t be answered, your mobile device or laptop can.

The big thing to remember is the strength of your VoIP system is determined by your internet connection at the end of the day. If the Freeway is open and capacity is good, and you have Quality of Service (QoS) which is similar to a dedicated bus lane for Voice traffic, then your Telephone System will be stable, strong, and work as expected.

NETCorp IT Solutions can assist you

With any business decision that can affect our ability to contact or be contacted by our clients, we need to consider the risks involved. Many business owners are reticent to change to a VoIP solution because of fear they might be worse off.

Hopefully, the discussion we have had regarding the real benefits will alleviate your fears.

Understandably, any recommendation that requires wholesale shifts in how companies conduct business may sound too risky. Considering a move to a 3CX VoIP phone system can be confusing with all the services and features that are available. Sifting through pages of fine print doesn’t contribute to making the right decision either.

It’s always best to have a knowledgeable, reliable advisor at hand to assist you with major business decisions like this one. Our advisors at NETCorp IT Solutions can assist you with choosing the best phone system for your specific needs and help you implement any changes in the most efficient way possible. And just in case, they are available to answer any additional questions you may have. As always, we look forward to the opportunity to positively impact your business.