Is VoIP Suitable for Small Businesses?

VoIP is a very good choice for small businesses. It’s inherently flexible and scalable, which makes it perfect for a business with the potential to grow from a staff of three today to thirty tomorrow. You’ll also benefit from lower costs across the board if you choose VoIP.

Let’s discuss some features and characteristics that make VoIP a great choice for small businesses.

Exciting Features

One of the jewels in VoIP’s crown as voice communications king is the wealth of features available only with this technology. By virtue of being developed programmatically, a VoIP provider can easily upgrade and update its service.

As VoIP providers transition industry-wide to Unified Communications offerings, services like secure enterprise chat and video conferencing will become commonplace with the best providers out there. This means you’ll benefit from these huge leaps in communications and collaborations technology without having to switch provider (so long as you choose well in the first instance!).

Though, as a small business, your needs may be simple right now, you never know just what opportunities you may be missing out on by not having access to the best in collaboration tools. Especially with the rising number of remote workers, it’s more important than ever to break down the barriers that presently block colleagues from communicating and collaborating just as they would if they were in the office.

Will I Need New Hardware?

With VoIP, there’s no need to purchase any new hardware. If you’re making the exciting move into your first office building with your team, you might worry that to be considered a ‘real business’, you’ll need a phone system with an impressively sized, in-house switchboard (PBX).

Fortunately, this is not the case. In fact, with a business phone system, not only will you not need a dedicated room to house the ‘brain’ of your phone system, but you won’t even need to purchase any desk phones for your employees if you don’t want to.

This is because any good VoIP provider will supply its customers with powerful VoIP apps, or ‘soft-phones’ (so-called because they work as software, rather than hardware). These will make it possible for you and your staff to make and take business calls from your personal devices, including your smartphone and desktop computer.

This can be a welcome relief when making the costly move to a new office; knowing that your phone system doesn’t have to cost you anything beyond a monthly fee is liberating. Not only this, but there’s evidence that following a BYOD (bring your own device) model of working actually improves staff job satisfaction and productivity.

Flexibility and Scalability

As we’ve mentioned, VoIP is inherently flexible and scalable. Whether you’re upsizing or downsizing your business, VoIP will make the process of scaling your phone system simple.

What’s more, as a small business, your agility is your greatest asset. The ability to make sharp decisions and changes quickly gives you an advantage over larger, more mature companies which are relatively slow to change with market conditions. Systems that preserve this fluidity, rather than stifling it, are essential to have onboard for those times when it’s important to exercise your speed advantage.

Since a great VoIP provider will make it fast and easy for you and your team to manage your phone system as you see fit, it will be easy to implement the results of any quick changes you do make.

With Yay.com, for example, you can delete a user with two clicks right from your web browser, or add any number of users with the same amount of effort. You can even purchase as many new phone numbers as you need from your dashboard, or add and remove users from call routes.

Having such administrative control right at your fingertips, accessible whenever you need it, puts VoIP light years ahead of traditional phone systems when it comes to user control and manageability. Instead of having to pay for and organise a maintenance technician to visit the office and manually change phone lines, you can do this virtually yourself from your browser. There’s not even any need for an IT administrator to perform these tasks. The platform is so intuitive that it will take just minutes of your time and a little experimentation to have a full-scale business phone system configured just the way you want it.

In this way, whether you’re taking on staff or are stepping down your business plans for the foreseeable future, your VoIP phone system can scale with you.

Monthly Subscription Service

Whilst most telecoms providers will tie you into a one- or two-year contract (at a minimum) when you sign on with them, a VoIP provider like Yay.com will offer a monthly subscription service.

For entrepreneurs and small businesses operating in a volatile environment, it’s important to minimise any unnecessary risk or financial obligation associated with your enterprise. Having a phone system that you know will cost you nothing next month if you ever need to step away is another advantage of VoIP versus traditional phone systems. Having to pay a hefty exit fee if business isn’t going well adds insult to injury unnecessarily.

Or, if things are going well and you want to upgrade or make additions to your plan, you can do so without worrying that you’ll be held to these changes for the duration of your plan. A monthly fee versus a biennial contract gives you and your small business the freedom to experiment and the space to grow.

Free Business Phone Numbers

For small businesses, expenses can add up absurdly quickly. We’ve already mentioned how, with a VoIP phone system, you won’t need to buy any hardware or pay for its upkeep but, with a provider like Yay.com you’ll also get one or more free business phone numbers with your account. The number of free phone numbers you’ll receive will depend on the number of users you’re purchasing with your plan but, just as small expenses can add up quickly, so can small savings!

Conclusion

A VoIP phone system is very well suited for small businesses. From its inherent scalability and flexibility to the wealth of powerful features on offer to you that would be impossible with other types of phone system, VoIP has many characteristics going for it that set it apart as well suited.

For more on the advantages of VoIP, read our comprehensive guide: What is VoIP?

If you’re interested in trying VoIP on for size, you can get to grips with all of Yay.com’s features by signing up for a 14-day, free VoIP trial.