Make a New Year's resolution to explore the cloud for business telephone services

With recent IDC research indicating that the world's mobile worker population will grow to more than 1.3 billion (more than 37% of the total workforce) by 2015, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) should make it a New Year's resolution to start capitalising on the benefits of being on the cloud as soon as possible.

Minimal or no investment in equipment

One of the strongest strategies for SMEs is moving business phone service to the cloud. Cloud-based technology powers the Hosted PBX, a solution that allows businesses of nearly any size to have a sophisticated telephone service with minimal or no investment in equipment. The service provider "hosts" the equipment and manages the network, and, thus, the business does not require an on-premises PBX system. A Hosted PBX system also provides significant long-term savings, with an impressive set of features and greatly simplified management and configuration.

A Hosted PBX lets employees work from home, remote offices, cellphones or even overseas while still being connected to the same office telephone service. The technology allows videoconferencing, which makes remote collaboration more effective than ever. Thanks to the virtual nature of the service, companies looking to cut down on office and vehicle costs can easily decentralise without customers ever hearing the difference. All employees are still connected to each other as if they were in the same physical office space.

Traditional on-site PBX systems, despite their often prohibitive costs, cannot match the advanced feature set of a Hosted PBX solution. In addition to standard features, such as auto-attendants with professional greetings, voicemail to email and North American long-distance calling, a Hosted PBX gives companies that use their phones intensively the ability to go deeper. With hunt groups, find-me/follow-me capability and time-based behaviours, the Hosted PBX is highly flexible.

Detailed, granular reports

For call centres and contact centres, which handle high call volume, the advantages can be even greater. Advanced call queuing and skill-based routing help managers to ensure that the right agent always gets the call. Ongoing reporting and performance tracking is made vastly more efficient with detailed, granular reports that managers can export at any time. These reports include mission-critical metrics, such as number of calls answered and unanswered, average time to answer, average hold time and much more.

Through a user-friendly web interface, users with administrative access can easily modify nearly any aspect of the service. Modifying an on-site PBX, for comparison, is considerably more complex and typically requires a service visit from a technician.

Business owners considering a move to a Hosted PBX option need to ensure they have the following to enable the transition:

• An Internet connection: With ample bandwidth for all staff using the phones.
  
• Network equipment: At a minimum you'll need a business-grade router capable of serving multiple employees. An unmanaged switch can expand the number of available ports, if required. Most Hosted PBX providers sell or recommend appropriate network equipment.
  
• Phones designed for Hosted PBX service: Again, nearly all providers sell recommended models.
  
• Power over Ethernet and battery back-up: Optional, but recommended for systems where constant phone connectivity is mission critical.
  
• Network/IT provider: Optional. Although not required for smaller and simpler systems, or deployments in which the customer is technically capable, an IT professional can be a powerful resource in a larger build out.

With these relatively simple requirements, SMEs can quickly start enjoying the benefits of a sophisticated telephone system without the investment in telephone equipment.