Tag Archives: #NewOffice

How VOIP Phones Can Secure Your Post-COVID Business

VOIP, , , , , , , ,
Hand of man using ip phone with flying icon of voip services and people connection, voip and telecommunication concept

VOIP technology can ensure a seamless transition for your remote workforce.

Every business on the globe is adapting to the need for post-COVID protocols and business practices. A big part of that is emphasizing remote and online working instead of in-office and face-to-face work. If you have been relying on meetings and phone line calls, or if your business does not yet have an integral phone system, it’s time to rethink your infrastructure.

VOIP offers fully remote phone services tailored to the needs of a modern business. From customer service pools to official office phone numbers, a VOIP system can do anything a traditional business PBX system can do and more. But what do virtual phones have to offer in the post-COVID era? Being able to communicate remotely and set up your offices anywhere in the world with the same numbers will come in handy in the days of remote business. Let’s take a look at some of the key ways that VOIP phones can secure your business in a post-COVID economy.

Turn Office Phones into Home Office Phones

VOIP phone numbers are assigned and accssed based on employee login accounts, not physical phone lines. This means that your employees can take their office phones home with them for remote work.

Clients, customers, and business partners will still be able to find each in-office contact as if they were still in the office, at the same phone numbers and often during the same hours, even though your team has gone home to work remotely in COVID-safety. In fact, companies already equipped with VOIP experienced some of the least shake-up when transitioning to work-at-home policies.

Remain Available During Phone-Line-Cutting  Disasters

One of the overlooked consequences of COVID is lack of preparedness for local disasters. Floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, and wind storms are still happening this year, but services are slower due to the need for extra care when in public. This means that natural disasters that take out phone lines can be devastating for local businesses. Unless, of course, your business runs on internet phones instead.

Rather than being cut off from the rest of the world. your offices and employees at home can continue taking calls even when competition with landlines are out for repairs.

Install Phones in a New Location Without an Installation

Business doesn’t stop either just because there’s a pandemic on the loose. If it’s time to open a new location or relocate your current business, phones are a big part of that. Normally, you would need a team of phone technicians laying wire and installing handsets. Not so, with VOIP. Internet phones can be installed via software.

Simply have your VOIP handsets delivered to the office and you can set them up without the need for strangers to enter your workplace. This allows for no-contact installation and, of course, helping your team set up in home-offices without the need for any serious hardware or technician-led installation as well.

Make Your Company Remote-Friendly and Remote-Accessible

VOIP is the single most remote-friendly business communication software. You can transform a once-limiting phone system into a full-featured and API-ready network for communication. Every member of your team can have their own number, access to a pool, or multiple numbers that can all be accessed from any internet-connected device.

New team members can be easily onboarded. Clients and customers can always find you at the same phone numbers, with or without a landline in between. Allow your team to be remote, your customers to be remote, and even remote onboarding and installation with VOIP phones.

Relocate or Disperse Your Office With the Same Numbers

Finally, remember how easy it is to take one system of numbers and reorganize. You can send an employee to a new office location with the same number. You can put together teams of people with numbers that follow them or assign new numbers just for team use. You can send everyone home, still able to answer their office phones or move to a new location, keeping the phones, access, and numbers all exactly the same.

For remote communication at business class, VOIP is up to the challenge. Contact us today to consult on your business’ VOIP expansion.

VOIP Opens Doors for Professional Parents

VOIP, , ,

VOIP enables working parents to telecommute while staying home with their kids.

In our society, it’s generally agreed that a fulfilling life is one where you can rock at your career and be a parent at the same time, but sometimes the two do not overlap well. Being a dedicated professional and being a good parent shouldn’t be mutually exclusive, especially since to be a good parent, you usually need to have a good job. The business world, in its own way, has waffled between seeing parents as steady reliable workers or as non-team-players. But the real problem is not that parents are more or less dedicated (everyone has their unique work style), it’s that parents can’t be in two places at once. Until now.

VOIP Parents Can Be in Two Places at Once

Traditionally, professional parents have had to make tough decisions. They have to choose when to come back to work after a new baby is born. They have to choose which spouse takes sick time off work when a child is ill. And for single parents, these choices are even more difficult. But often the problems associated with being a parent aren’t about not being dedicated, they’re about not being able to come into the office. This is exactly why VOIP along with sister-software on the cloud are opening doors for professional parents to finally do the impossible: To stay home with the kids and show up for work at the same time.

VOIP Telecommuting When a Child is Sick

When a child is too sick to go to school, a parent must stay home to take care of them. Especially if they can’t find a babysitter or don’t have a retired grandparent available for the task. The child must be comforted, fed nourishing food, and monitored for ‘go to the hospital’ symptoms. But other than that? The child is home napping in bed or watching cartoons in a semi-awake state and the parent is left… cleaning the house? Balancing their checkbook? Weeding the garden?

Trust us, we know that most parents with a napping child home sick would rather be tearing through their work to-do list. With VOIP, a parent can now set up their home office to take the calls they would usually take and collaborate on their ongoing projects with little to no interruption. They can answer the phone for their regular clients and even participate in staff meetings, all while also responsibly home with their sick child.

VOIP Telecommuting With a New Baby

In fact, even parents of newborns can take advantage of the ability to smoothly telecommute with a VOIP platform. Parents who have just brought home a new infant will go through that hallmark hectic sleep-deprived time when their brains are nothing but adrenalin and oxytocin. But once the baby starts sleeping through the night, often there are several hours a day where nursing mothers and bonding fathers have time to kill. They finally have enough sleep, the baby naps for up to 16 hours a day, and they’re left twiddling their thumbs.

When it’s not yet safe to head to the office but the house is quiet, this is where VOIP closes the gap. Parents who might be out of the office for another several months can come back and start picking up the slack from their understaffed team. They can get re-acquainted with projects making their later come-back easier and they can start re-engaging with clients, taking service calls, and managing projects in a way that is beneficial to both the company and the professional parents. The company gets their team back together early with one telecommuting member, the parent gets to refresh their mind from baby-time, and the team gets a few adorable pictures and video chats of a smiling baby to warm hearts and boost morale.

VOIP is the Key to Work-Life Balance for Professional Parents

Companies are always looking for new ways to improve employee work-life balance while getting more productivity from the team, not less. And VOIP is the key. VOIP unifies your phone and communication systems so that no matter where employees are located, they can jump in as if they were sitting right in the office. And while employers might be thinking “This will be great for business trips and unifying multiple offices,” VOIP is also the solution for parents. So they can clock in hours even when they’re home taking care of a child.

Finally, being a good parent doesn’t have to occasionally clash with being a dedicated professional. Because parents can finally be in two places at once, without even switching their phone number. Contact us today to discover how setting up VOIP for your business can keep your professional parents engaged and happily clocking hours even when family obligation takes them out of the office.

10 Instances When Should You Call Your Managed IT Team?

Manage Service, , , , ,
Mature business man at an office desk looking at a laptop while calling his managed IT team for help

Your managed service provider is here to handle all of these issues plus many more, let us handle it and you can get back to what you do best!

Working with a Managed IT service comes with a surprising number of perks. It’s like having an on-staff IT team, only instead of you taking care of them, they take care of you. A managed IT team makes it their business to keep an eye on your system and make sure your business tech performs exactly the way you want it to. They’ll help you build the perfect tech stack, select and setup the right hardware, and make sure all your software services work together. But they’re also there for the tough times when your team needs tech support.

So today, we’re featuring ten times when you should absolutely call your Managed IT team for assistance, guidance, or to make your other services shape up and act right.

When Your Computers Malfunction

If your computers stop functioning properly, in any way, then you can call your managed IT team for help. Sometimes, it’s as easy as turning the device or app off and back on again, but often technical problems are beyond the skills of your service teams. After all, there’s a big difference between being able to use software that’s working correctly and fix something that is not working the way it ought.

When Your Internet Stops working

One of the most common calls we get is when the internet for your office building goes out. Internet service providers are not always reliable, and worse, they don’t often put a rush on getting your service back online even when your entire business depends on availability to your customers and partners. A managed IT team will get on the phone and get to the bottom of your ISP outage.

When Your Software Won’t Work Together

Every modern business has a tech stack that is supposed to work synergistically. Each piece of software supplies data or infrastructure for the next. And when they stop working together, everything can come to a crashing halt. When your system stops working together, it’s time to call your managed IT team who will get your software all neatly stacked once more.

When It’s Time to Upgrade Your Software

Upgrades are a delicate part of any business’ lifecycle. When one piece of software in your tech stack is about to change its code, you need the rest of the stack to stay put and to ensure that the changes won’t wreck your current system. Your managed IT team can handle that for you.

When You Want to Rebuild Your Tech Stack

Likewise, you need to add new software to the stack or replace an older piece of the stack with the latest best variation, call your managed IT team to make sure everything integrates just the way you need it to.

When You Need Your Current Software to Do Something New

Interestingly, your managed IT team can also help when you’re not changing a thing, except how you use the software you have. When your business evolves, expands, or adopts a new practice, it can be necessary to find new ways to use your current technology. You can trust your team’s expertise to know how to put the features of your business software to new and creative use.

When You’re Worried That a Hacker Might Have Infiltrated

If everything is going well except that you’ve seen signs that perhaps a hacker or malware has infiltrated the system, your managed IT team is where you turn to for advice. They can help check for defense breaches and get rid of any lingering scripts or malicious software that may have taken root. As well as knowing what to do when there’s risk of a data breach.

When You Have New Regulations to Meet

Speaking of data breaches, the latest wave of data security regulations is ever-more strict and your managed IT team can help you get compliant. When there are new regulations released or your business starts doing something that requires new regulations, we can help make sure your standard operating procedure is within the new parameters.

When You’ve Lost Data to a Common Data Disaster

When fire, flood, or human error causes your business to lose a chunk of important data or access to data-handling devices, your managed IT team can help you restore everything from backups and sometimes even recover the latest data from a damaged source.

When You Need to Set Up a New Location

Finally, if your business is moving or expanding into a new location, your managed IT team can help you get everything set up in the new place exactly the way you need it, from the hardware and workstations to integration with your cloud services.

Contact us today to find out more about what managed IT can do for your business and how to get the most from your managed IT services!