Hosted VoIP services make a lot of sense for a lot of reasons. Chief among these is low cost of entry, minimal infrastructure management requirements and relatively easy scalability both upward and downward.
Challenges ensue when attempting to deploy VoIP in situations where high and consistent levels of performance, availability and reliability are required. If you're on a call with distant friends or family and a VoIP call is interrupted or dropped due to connection inconsistencies, it's typically only a minor inconvenience to have to redial the call. If you're in a conference room with several highly paid executives, lawyers or accountants, each minute of non-connected time could have costs in the thousands of dollars.
This means that selection criteria for business VoIP must be higher and more stringent than most consumer and SMB solutions can meet. PingTone, a pioneering VoIP supplier, set out specifically to address the gaps between what earlier hosted VoIP services offered and the performance levels many business users want and need.
In a recent conversation with Focus, PingTone president Bill Smedberg outlined some of the specific steps the company has taken to deliver enterprise-class hosted VoIP services.
The results of this approach have been a hosted VoIP service network purpose-built for business customers. PingTone also enjoys an average account size as much as 10 times larger than that of competing providers, and very high levels of customer satisfaction and retention, Smedberg told Focus. "Our best customers start out with us, migrate away because of acquisition or whatever and then come back after experiencing disappointment with other providers," Smedberg added. (One such customer was affiliated with a venture capital firm that had invested in another VoIP provider.)
Before it became a necessity during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, many companies had already begun realizing the benefits inherent in embracing remote work. These benefits are substantial and signal that (even when the pandemic is but a memory) remote work will continue to flourish and become a mainstay in the redefined workplace - particularly when it comes to VoIP. This guide will demonstrate how the workforce is changing and leaning toward remote work as a permanent business choice, explain the critical role VoIP will continue to play in supporting remote work, and highlight some of the new trends and innovations coming in 2021 for VoIP. more