Tag Archives: VOIP

The Benefits of Voicemail to Email

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Phone keys mobile communication - Voicemail to email concept

Can you get your voicemail when your not in the office?

Voicemail is an important part of business communication, but it can be a nuisance to manage. Why should you have to replay all your messages to find the one you need to hear again? What do you do if you press the wrong key and accidentally delete an important message? The good news is that there’s a VoIP feature that lets you receive all your voicemail in your inbox. This feature, logically, is called voicemail to email.
Messages in your inbox
When you enable the feature, your VoIP system forwards each message to your inbox as an audio attachment. The subject line and text will tell you when it arrived, what number, and the caller’s name if it’s available. You can choose to delete messages from your voicemail automatically when they’re sent, or to leave them there. Leaving them gives you extra flexibility, but auto-deletion guarantees your voicemail will never be full.
Once the messages are in your inbox, you can employ all the tools that are available for managing email. You can sort them into folders, mark them as high-priority, and forward them. You can set up filters to highlight messages from some callers and mark others as spam.
Sometimes an old voicemail message is the only place you have an important piece of information, such as a caller’s phone number. Being able to get back to it easily can save a business deal.
The limit on your messages is only the limit on your inbox. That’s usually a very generous cap, but voice attachments are large, so you may need to delete or archive old messages.
Messages as audio files
The attachment holding the voice message is an audio file, usually in MP3 or WAV format, so you can treat it as an independent file. This is useful for archival purposes. You can save the attachment as a file, delete the message from your inbox, and have a permanent record. This way you can save as many messages as you want, organizing them into folders using any scheme. For instance, you can save all voice messages from a supplier and save having to ask questions they’ve already answered.
Transcription to text
You can choose to have the VoIP system put a text transcription of each message into your email. This will save time when reviewing your messages, especially if you’re in a noisy environment where it’s hard to make out what the caller said. Copying down phone numbers while listening to voicemail is seriously annoying. Having the number in the transcription is much easier.
Not all voice transcriptions will be equally useful. If the signal-to-noise ratio is poor, the transcription could be spotty. Even so, it will often give you enough of the message to tell whether it needs your immediate attention or not. Sometimes the transcription could even pick up words that you have trouble identifying.
Extra convenience
Letting your VoIP service send your voicemail to your email makes the messages far more convenient to handle. All your communications are in one place. You can review the messages at your desktop as well as your phone.
If you know your associates are using voicemail to email, you can be more confident that they’ll get your voice messages and notice them. People are apt to ignore or lose messages on their phones, but if they’re getting them in email, they’ll pay more attention to them, and you’re more likely to get a response on the first try.
SystemsNet offers hosted PBX and VoIP, with features including conferencing, auto attendants, “follow me,” voicemail to email, and much more. Contact us to learn how you can have a better business phone system.

Have You Made The Switch To VoIP In Your Call Center?

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The businessman chooses VOIP button on the touch screen with a futuristic background .The concept VOIP

Are you ready to make the move?

If you are currently operating an in-house call center and you are still using legacy contact center solutions to perform all your communication tasks, we think it is time for you to rethink your situation. When you adopt Voice over Internet Protocol technology, you will immediately be able to notice the difference. Voice over Internet Protocol technology can do amazing things for your business and you will have the powerful tool you need to deliver outstanding customer service and functionalities to your call center.

VoIP services will provide you with the dependability, flexibility, and mobility you need to reach a high level success in the modern business world. A Voice over Internet Protocol solution will route the different voice communications over your internet connection. The solution will also use the same lines that can be merged on your utility bills.

Not only will Voice over Internet Protocol technology give you the opportunity to reduce costs, you will be provided with a variety of capabilities and features that you will not be able to get on the traditional phone systems you are currently using.

Monitoring Tools

If you want to make sure your call center agents are taking the proper approach when they are answering phone calls, you can use the reporting and monitoring tools to listen to conversations. When you hire new employees, you can also use these tools to give them an understanding of what the right approach should be. When you upgrade your communications to a Voice over Internet Protocol call center, you will be equipped with a variety of monitoring and reporting tools that will provide you with the data you need to serve your customers better.

On The Go(Mobility)

You will not have a strong call center if you do not have strong and productive employees. Your call center is going to need to retain your star employees for as long as possible. When you use Voice over Internet Protocol technology, you will be able to retain those employees even if they move or become remote workers. A hosted PBX solution will allow them to do everything they would do if they were actually in the office. Since calls are routed through the internet, your employees will be able to work from any location, as long as a strong internet connection exists. When you can create a great team of remote workers, you will have a strong and productive call center.

UC(Unified Communications)

When you have multiple ways to interact with your customers, they will be more likely to reach out to you because they will be able to contact you using a method they are comfortable with. The right cloud technology will allow you to integrate unified communications. When you properly integrate a Unified communications strategy, you will be able to use messaging, email, chat, social media, voice, and other communications methods to interact with customers. Not all customers are comfortable reaching out to business over the phone, but when you give them more communication options, they will be able to choose their preferred method of communication.

When your Voice over Internet Protocol is going to be provided by an outside supplier or vendor, you will need to make sure you will receive the best services. You are going to need a supplier and provider who will make sure your call center will stay online, even during outages or bad weather. Are you ready to always be there for your customers, especially during the times of the year when calls are constantly coming in? Do not hesitate to contact us today for more information on VoIP.

How Does Voice over IP Work?

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Voice over IP, communication support, call center and customer service help desk

Voice Over IP

You’ve heard a lot about VoIP, or Voice over Internet Protocol. It saves money while giving you features that the traditional phone network can’t provide. But just what is it, really? How does it work?

The short answer is that it’s digitized sound sent over the Internet. A device at your end samples what you’re saying and converts it to bits. It gets bits back and converts them to sound. But what makes it useful is that you can treat it just like a phone call. You can call landline phones from your VoIP phone, and they can call you. You can make calls between phones from different manufacturers or use an application on your smartphone or desktop computer.

The office VoIP network

An office phone network, whether it’s based on traditional or VoIP technology, is called a private branch exchange or PBX. The Internet version is called an IPBX. Its central equipment can be in the office, in a remote data center, or in the cloud. VoIP phones are connected to the PBX over data connections such as Wi-Fi and Ethernet. Sometimes the phones use the same local network as the computers; sometimes they use a separate network for more consistent quality.

Either way, your phone converts what you say into data and sends it to the IPBX, which is really just a server running specialized software. If the equipment is based in your office, your call goes out onto the public telephone system when it leaves the building. If it’s cloud-based, your voice may travel almost the entire distance as data, saving the cost of a long-distance call.

The conversion to data uses compression techniques, so the bandwidth needed for one conversation isn’t very high. If an office has a lot of phones, though, it needs to have enough bandwidth to let many conversations keep up and should have a router with VoIP-friendly features.

You may have heard of VoIP phones referred to as SIP phones. SIP is one of two common protocols for making VoIP connections. The other is called H.323. The phone has to be compatible with the protocol your exchange uses, but phones from different manufacturers for the same protocol are interchangeable.

You don’t actually have to give up your old phone. Devices called Analog Telephone Adapters (ATAs) let you plug in one or more ordinary telephones and convert their audio signals to data. It’s less expensive than buying VoIP phones, but not all the features are available.

What happens when you make a call?

When you place a call, you might hear touch tones, but they’re just to give a sense of familiarity. The keys you press are converted to data, and the exchange determines whether you’re making an in-office call or outside call. If the call is within the IPBX’s area, it handles the whole connection. It isn’t restricted to voice data in this case; many IPBXs can carry video and documents as well. The ability to combine these is called “Unified Communication.”

If the call goes through a cloud-based service, it may emerge on the public telephone network only at a point local to the receiving party — possibly in another nation. If you’re calling another VoIP exchange, the call may not have to go over the public network at all. Sending data is very inexpensive, so VoIP calls cost much less than regular long-distance calls.

To get a clean-sounding conversation, you need an Internet connection that has enough bandwidth and will move the data along at a consistent speed. A poor connection may sound choppy, parts of the conversation may drop out, or you may hear an echo. Equipment which is designed to deliver “QoS” (quality of service) for voice data will reduce the incidence of problems.

If you want to learn more

Several websites have good introductions to VoIP for the non-technical reader. Here are a couple to look at:

Whatever you need to run on your network, SystemsNet keeps it running. Contact us for details.

VoIP Telephony and Why You Should Consider Using It

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Dialing telephone keypad. VoIP telephony and the benefits

Ready for the flexibility of VoIP?

The telecommunications age began in the 1830’s with the first telegraph equipment. It’s contemporary developments in Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, changed the world forever.

The first attempts at communicating “long distance” using electricity covered less than a mile. They were, however, responsible for the development of binary code, electrical rotary switching technology and many other techniques and technologies that form the basis of today’s communication revolution. From these beginnings through to the invention of the telephone and human-operated dialing and switching systems we have evolved to digitalized communication techniques and protocols for connecting to virtually anyone, any place, at any time. One of the technologies spawned from the simple wires and taps connection more than 150 years ago is VoIP telephony.

VoIP stands for Voice over Internet Protocol. It represents a technology with global reach. VoIP works by digitizing sound. Ordinary POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service, no kidding, that’s what it is called) was invented in the mid-1800’s, with the first patent issued in 1876. POTS used analog interfaces to push or vibrate sound along a copper wire from one destination to another. VoIP expands this capability by encoding the values of the vibrations into binary code, dividing the message into small packets and reassembling them at the receiver’s end of the conversation.

While POTS has served us well for more than 100 years, VoIP is an improvement in many ways:

• The clarity of the digital signal is vastly superior to the analog version.

• The digitized signals can be transmitted cheaper and quicker than the analog signals.

• The digital signals can be moved out of the phone realm and into emails automatically creating a Unified Communication Platform.

• VoIP signals can transmit video and audio connections on a greater variety of devices. This means that you can have virtual machines known as “softphones” accessible from any computer, smartphone, or tablet.

• VoIP systems reduce the need for duplicate wiring that analog phones require by using your existing internet connectivity and cabling.

• VoIP phone systems make internal calling free even between geographically distinct sites by using SIP technology.

VoIP systems are available both as an on premise or as a hosted solution. In an on premise installation, you will need to set up a VoIP PBX, VoIP router and voicemail server. With a hosted solution you will still need a router to translate the VoIP traffic so that it goes to the right party with the proper quality of service assured.

While we’ve talked about some of the technical advantages and features of a VoIP system, let’s look at some of the benefits to the user community. VoIP systems being computer-based provide a much more comprehensive array of user experiences than a POTS PBX system can. With VoIP systems, you can set up users and features using a graphical user interface that allows drag and drop movement of phones and features. Your phone system can be accessed remotely and changes made from outside your office at full internet speeds rather than at the dial-up modem speeds of a POTS system.

VoIP systems allow, as mentioned before, Softphones. Softphones will enable a user to answer their desk phone from anywhere in the world provided they can connect to your installation through the internet. This function allows your team to work remotely at another internal office, at a different desk in the same room, from their home office, or from a customer site. When they are fully mobile, they can answer their desk phone on their cell phone as well. In some configurations, you can even use them for hot swapped offices by providing users a login code that will assign a specific desk phone to them for a given period or until they log out of the system.

The majority of VoIP systems create a receptionist console that can monitor all other lines to see if they are in use, manage out of office messages, allow hunt groups and a myriad of other features. All while reducing the total cost of ownership, improving call quality, providing video conferencing in certain circumstances and eliminating the expense of the site to site calls.

If you are interested in learning more about VoIP telephony and the benefits and applications for your business, please contact Systems Net today for an educational consultation or feel free to browse our website. As a premiere provider of VoIP and other IT services, we look forward to working to exceed your expectations.