If you’re not using VoIP yet, then you’re behind the times. The pandemic taught companies that they need to reach as many operational areas as possible from anywhere. If your building is evacuated, how are you going to answer the landline phone? Having Sarah who is working from home call a customer from her personal number can come back to bite you should she leave the company.
Cloud-based phone systems are now becoming the norm for a lot of reasons.
But this doesn’t mean they’re always set up right. Have you had trouble with your VoIP service? Does your company directory have only two options because you can’t figure out how to set up more? VoIP also needs to have bandwidth resources, and if it doesn’t, calls can drop in a heartbeat. One bad experience is all a potential customer needs to cause them to lose trust in you. Here are a few best practices to improve your VoIP business phone system.
Use Quality of Service settings on your router or firewall
What is quality of service? In networking terms, QoS enables organizations to adjust their overall network traffic by prioritizing specific high-performance applications and services. Common high priority traffic includes VoIP, video conferencing, streaming media, internet protocol television (IPTV), and video-on-demand. By setting the quality of service settings on your router to prioritize your VoIP service, you are ensuring that your VoIP traffic is given the highest priority when passing through the router.
Have a backup Internet Connection
Internet outages happen. By having a backup Internet connection, you can ensure that your VoIP service will fail-over to your backup connection during an outage and you don’t experience any downtime for your phone service. Even if you don’t use VoIP, having a backup Internet connection is recommended these days. It’s likely that most everything (if not everything) your company uses to function and accomplish your work is connected through the Internet. By having a redundant connection, you’ll keep productivity up and costly downtime to a minimum.
Give your Team Time and Training to Learn the System
This sounds obvious, but many times we expect employees to know all of the ins and outs of new technologies in a short amount of time. By giving them proper training, including hands-on training and how-to materials covering their new phones and auto-attendants, we can help expedite this process. Make sure your VoIP provider will be providing some kind of training before closing any deal. We’ve found hands-on training to be the best and with a little bit of time, most employees will be pros at the new system and love all of the new features.
Use a Local Provider for VoIP
Use a local provider for your VoIP deployment. This way you can have a local resource to call for support or come on-site for troubleshooting if needed. We like to think you won’t have any issues with your VoIP service, but things happen, and having someone local to rely on can be extremely beneficial. Faster response times and being able to have someone come on-site to troubleshoot issues can be invaluable.
