Ahead4 have been installing fully hosted phone solutions for many happy small and larger companies for over a decade, see below for some key benefits. At the bottom of the page, we have also answered some of the most common questions & concerns we receive when meeting customers for the first time, using less jargon and sales manor often found with VoIP companies.
Here are just some of the Key features of our Hosted Solution:
1. Free UK mobile calls
2. Free landline calls (geographical)
3. Multiple numbers to give impression of offices in key towns
4. Free divert to mobile
5. Free internal calls even from offices in different locations
6. Hosted PBX; no hardware onsite (only phones)
7. Free voicemail; can be emailed to you anywhere in the world
8. Conference calls
9. Auto-attendant (customers can choose via menu to go directly to the department they need)
10. Simple to add extra lines or users with no engineer needed onsite
11. Free hold music (you can also upload your own)
12. Recorded calls
13. Call stats; missed calls, most received, and made calls and many more
14. Shared company contacts directory
15. Fixed price per user / desk easy to manage growth costs
16. Desktop dialling from CRM database
17. Call Centre Reporting (Akixi)
Why VoIP system over what we have already?
Not only have ISDN based systems been given an end of life date, VoIP has many benefits, many listed above, with customers able to have numbers moved to any number of locations, no onsite hardware is required to be physically relocated when your business needs move premises’. This brings many cost benefits, adding additional incoming lines can be done within minutes without the need of onsite BT engineers, this makes adding external offices or new staff as easy as plugging in a new phone.
But what if internet is down?
This is one of the most misconstrued points that gets brought up when talking about VoIP, however, this is actually one of the main positives. For example, imagine a worst case scenario such as the main lines to your office have been cut; our local example in recent years at our South Woodham Ferrers branch occurred when the cables were stolen from the ground for the copper value, this meant both calls and internet went down for many local businesses. Should this occur for VoIP systems, they can simply be diverted to a mobile. Unlike old systems you can simply pick up the VoIP desk phone and take it to a local location either home or temporary office and carry on as normal, receiving and making calls with the original phone number. The system can also be used with temporary options like a 4g dongle, in most cases, this is just not possible with traditional systems. In fact, our VoIP systems can be setup to do many of the above automatically if no phones are working across all your offices.
What about the quality?
This is our favourite question, many businesses and organisations worldwide have been using VoIP for many years without any call quality problems, in fact VoIP isn’t really that new of a technology, but unfortunately we believe many reasons VoIP got off to a bad & slow start here in the UK was many suppliers installed VoIP phones sharing the same internet connection as the office computers, when they already had a slow connection to start with, and subsequently cutting corners or trying to save money where they could. The answer to this is with Ahead4, our engineers work out the best setup for your specific requirements. If you are lucky enough to have a fast internet connection (fibre optic) you can use your current internet, in some situations we simply tweak your router to allow VoIP traffic to get priority over say YouTube videos (QOS). However, in many cases customers using this technology are in remote locations, with very slow internet, in this case we would setup one internet connection to run all computers and your data needs, and a second line to run the phones only, this is similar to how older systems would have worked with an ISDN line just for the calls, except a newer DSL internet connection used for VoIP can handle many more calls via just one connection.
So like most computer services, if done right, you're going to have a good experience.
Can I use my mobile?
In some instances you can use specific apps for certain tasks when either out and about or simply to have better reliability if moving around your business; such as a warehouse. For more information, check out the link below to the app page.