VoIP News

3 Ways Mobile Apps Change VoIP/UC Choices for Businesses

Mobile devices have hugely influenced voice over IP (VoIP) and unified communications (UC) over the past few years. Mobile apps for VoIP in many cases drive the solution that works best for many businesses. With maturity comes tighter and more seamless integration, better security, ease of use, and the incredible convenience benefits of aligning with fast-moving mobile technology.

Mobile VoIP has become a staple within the solution. We have become a mobile society in general, and as we have integrated our work and our personal lives, mobile apps have begun to drive the choice of phone system for many businesses. No more do you need to be tied to a desk or settle for simple call forwarding

The evolution of cloud-based solutions facilitates mobile device support and ease of integration with VoIP. Anytime/anywhere is a reality with mobile devices that are extensions on the business phone system. The ability—regardless of where the mobile user is located—allows for VoIP calls to be handled just as normal phone calls.

What Mobile Apps Drive the Business’ Choice of Phone System?

As with any business or enterprise solution, a needs analysis will uncover requirements for your communication needs. Simply need voice calls? Any VoIP system can work depending on the number of seats or users. Cost, broadband access, Session Initiation Protocol trunks, security features, and administrative features for adding or deleting users may be other factors in determining your best fit.

If you have many employees who use mobile devices as their primary phone, the specific mobile apps available may drive your choice of which phone system to implement. Such workers may include field-based employees, such as sales and support personnel, and travelling executives. In that case, mobile apps that benefit the company include:

• Web conferencing;
• Video conferencing;
• Presence;
• Instant messaging and text messaging;
• Email transcription (voicemail-to-email and email-to-voicemail);
• Screen sharing;
• Calendaring; and
• Administration (of extension) tasks.

Top 3 Ways Mobile Apps Change VoIP Choices

Your employee base and existing usage of mobile devices drive the type of VoIP system your business chooses to implement. Selection of the appropriate system will benefit the company and the employees by increasing productivity and efficiencies. Examples of applications are laid out above, but there are three essential ways mobile app options drive the appropriate choice of VoIP system:

• Employees primarily use mobile devices for business and may not physically be in the office.
• Seamless integration of mobile devices enables full phone extensions capability and remote applications at any time.
• Mobile device policy drives use of these devices for personal and business cases.

Summary

Many choices are available to your business for a new VoIP system. Not every system works for every company. Each company—by size, business proposition, number of employees, and types of employees, requirements of the phones employees use (office-based versus field-based, where mobile devices are the primary phones)—has different requirements. These days, mobility drives the VoIP system choice for more and more companies as increasing numbers of employees use mobile devices as their primary phone.

The maturity of mobility facilitates the selection of a system from a “mobile-first” approach. This trend will continue throughout the next several years based on advancements in mobile technology and emerging mobile apps. You may even see the mobile phone simply replace your desktop phone!

How Countrywide can help

Our hosted VoIP solutions for business offers a feature-rich business telephony system that is essential to any unified communications offer. From hunt groups and auto attendant functionality, to fixed mobile convergence applications and the ability to make/receive business calls on all personal mobile devices, VoIP brings a myriad of opportunities to your organisation. We also provide all our customers with an online management portal, so you can get back control of your phone system.

View our VoIP solutions page.