What You Need to Know About Call Answering Services and Hosted Telephony

 When your business gets busy or you have to deal with out-of-hours phone calls, one of the first things that springs to many business owners’ minds is the idea of hiring a call answering service to handle incoming calls for you.

That’s a fine idea, but it can be expensive in the long term. You’ll have to pay a monthly subscription fee high enough to cover your share of the call centre’s time and manpower. 

An alternative option to consider is hosted telephony.

What hosted telephony means

Unlike a normal PBX telephone system, with hosted telephony all the phone numbers and services are delivered via the cloud.

That means you can easily:

• divert any of your hosted phone numbers to ring any landline or mobile phone
• send incoming calls to voicemail based on to the number the caller dialled
• automatically switch all incoming calls to voicemail at set times of day
• scale your telephone system by adding or removing numbers and services
• keep your phone numbers the same during a business relocation

You don’t need a squad of call centre staff to do it for you, and you don’t need to pay for any expensive PBX telephony hardware. All you need is a hosted telephony service you can control via the web at the click of a button (or the swipe of a touchscreen).

Hosted telephony and VoIP

You can cut even more telephony costs by using Voice over Internet Protocol to make outgoing calls. Central London businesses typically have high speed broadband internet, but if you’re in a relatively rural location your internet connectivity may be too limited to support business-quality VoIP calling.

360ict provides managed IT services and business services to SMEs in London and the south-east. To learn more about your business’ telephony options, give us a call on 0208 663 4000