Nowadays, any service needed by a company is hosted by third party. The service can be a server, application or a platform. Similarly telephone lines can also be hosted through hosted PBX.
With the use of hosted PBX, SMB’s can have a very high tech and sophisticated communication network without having to pay for the telephone equipment or incurring heavy costs. The VoIP provider manages the network and the company employees can work from home, office or while on the move. The services provided by hosted PBX are better than the traditional telephones. It provides HD voice which in the traditional one is very expensive.
Advantages
The advantages of hosted PBX over traditional PBX are discussed below:
Increased Productivity
Performance of the employees can be tracked in the hosted PBX, calls are recorded automatically and traffic can be monitored and can be worked upon.
Cost Saving
There is no initial expenditure on expensive telephone equipment. The only expenditure is on subscription and tariff which is peanuts in comparison to traditional one’s initial spending. Long distance, not much technicians required for maintenance are some other reasons why cost is saved in a hosted PBX.
Flexibility
Employees can work from anywhere.
Scalability
Like most of the hosted technology the number of lines can be increased or decreased depending upon the traffic requirement.
Time saving
Hosted PBX is setup quickly compared to a traditional telephone system.
Expertise not required
Other than the given advantages, hosted PBX is useful for SMBs in a way that expertise required to work with hosted PBX is not very much. Even novices can work with it finely. In a world with rapid changes, hosted PBX gives much required flexibility in settings. Other major factor working for it is that only single vendor is used to provide the service. This reduces the burden of dealing with different providers.
Unified Communication
Hosted PBX provides a unified communication services in a very user friendly manner. Everything needed to communicate with outside world is on your fingertips. Be it a voice call, a conference call, a video chat or a voice mail. A call can be managed very easily even at high volume as everything is on the screen or the dashboard of the user. The faults generated are also very easily handled online. So, no more waiting for the on-site visit of an engineer to repair the broke machine or faulty system.
User Friendly
Real time access of the system is provided in hosted PBX. You can control data usage, monitor traffic activities or modify the access privileges. This is all done very easily as the configuration of the settings rests with the user.
Added Features
Features such as voice mail to e-mail, forwarding contacts and ability to check messages and voicemails online are provided. The main viability of the PBX depend upon business and changes from one environment to another. As the lines increase and the traffic is huge hosted PBX starts to show some weaknesses even with the option of scalability so, future growth should be considered while making the decision.
Conclusion
We saw that hosted PBX is the technology that has more advantages than it has drawbacks. So its high time companies start considering hosted PBX as a legitimate option for their communication purposes, because in this competitive environment company with cut throat technology at its disposal will be able to survive. So will companies adapt hosted PBX or will it die just as many buzzwords have?
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- License: Creative Commons image source
Renuka Rana, Editor at TheRealPBX spends considerable part of her time in writing about technology including cloud hosting and Hosted PBX. When not writing, she loves to dig deeper into knowing the best and the latest technology in industry.
