Article from Jon Arnold, independent
telecom analyst
During my most recent series, I
focused on the opportunity presented by remote working, especially for SMBs
looking to be more agile. Many of the long-standing obstacles have fallen away
with today’s technologies, and remote working can have a transformative effect
on your business. This was a key takeaway at the end of that series, and it’s
leading me to examine the power of transformation more broadly for SMBs.
While remote working is mainly an
operational decision, adopting VoIP is driven by technology and the need for IT
to update the phone system. You can very easily let that frame the context for
this decision, with VoIP
being a simple solution to a basic problem. When your legacy phone system
reaches end of life, a replacement is needed since everyone still needs to make
calls.
There’s nothing wrong with that
thinking, and it certainly was the basis for buying your last phone system. You
can do the same this time around – after all, a phone system is just a phone
system. At face value, VoIP is exactly that; it looks, feels and behaves just
like TDM. Your employees won’t notice the difference, and it’s totally
transparent to them.
Telephony has long been a utility
with little strategic value to the business. Legacy telephony was pretty much
an oligarchy where everyone had the same services and paid the same high
prices. Innovation was not part of the equation and there was no competitive
advantage to be had for businesses.
Are You Still Thinking This Way
About Telephony?
If so, and if you’re happy doing that,
there’s no point in reading further. VoIP initially emerged out of a demand for
lower cost telephony, but the ultimate vision was never about replicating
legacy service. The creators of VoIP –
the Israeli military, by the way – recognized the potential of the Internet to
be an alternate transport medium to the PSTN for voice traffic. This opened up
a world of new possibilities for where and how telephony could be utilized,
since users no longer needed to be tethered to a fixed wireline connection.
Furthermore, the service itself was
based on the principals of legacy telephony, but using a fundamentally
different set of standards and protocols. VoIP was developed from the outset
with Internet-based tools, making it natively interoperable with other Internet-based
communications modes. Unlike legacy telephony, VoIP was not built as an island,
separate and independent from all the other modes we use all day long at work.
You don’t need a deep technical
knowledge of VoIP’s inner workings to see how this changes the nature of
telephony. For businesses that are striving for a competitive edge, any form of
innovation must be considered, and that’s the plane where VoIP enters the
conversation. Instead of viewing VoIP as
telephony, you need to see it as a digital communications application that
can be used wherever employees have access to broadband.
Think about what that means for
liberating employees from their desks. Think about what that means for the need
to centralize your staff for ease of proximity. Think about what that means for
how you communicate with customers and support their needs. Think about
workplace efficiencies that come from employees being more responsive and
accessible, along with being less stressed from wasting time playing phone tag.
Think about how the flexibility of IP communications empowers employees to
embrace new technologies. Think about how VoIP lays the foundation to adopt new
applications for even richer communications experiences.
To Break Through, You Must Break
With
These are just a few examples of how
VoIP is a first step towards moving beyond telephony. This is about thinking
strategically instead of tactically. The underlying challenge is the fact that
legacy telephony has not evolved for decades, so there has been little reason
to think about it in new ways – despite the fact that the Internet has changed
everything around us, and mobility is now the preferred way to communicate.
Breaking with an
ossified way of thinking is essential for getting transformational value out of
VoIP.
Replicating legacy service is easy, but offers no long term advantage. To
get a break through, you have to look at VoIP with new eyes, and
see it as a communications application rather than a new phone system. The
breakthrough comes from seeing VoIP integrated with other communications modes,
allowing employees to do new things in new ways – none of which would be
possible by staying with legacy telephony.
Transformation doesn’t have to
happen all at once, especially if you’re not ready for it. The beauty of VoIP
is that you can take baby steps along this path, so the vision doesn’t have to
all be there at the start. In fact, you won’t likely know what’s possible until
you start using VoIP, and from there, it’s just a matter of how much
transformation you want to make the business stronger. If you’re not sure what
that could look like, I’ll provide some examples in my next post, so check back
with me soon.
To learn more contact MCC’s Telecom
Solutions Division today!
For more details please contact us at:
Memphis Communications Corporation
4771 Summer Ave
Memphis, TN 38122
Tel: 901.725.9271
Fax: 901.272.3577
Toll Free: 866.805.5893
Service and Supplies: 901.257.2500
Website: http://www.memphiscommunications.net
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