Once upon a time, everyone used landlines. Now they’re an increasingly rare sight. The number in use by U.S. businesses has dropped from 10 million in 2010, to just 6.4 million in 2018. Businesses are abandoning landlines in droves, with some telecoms companies predicting that the landline will be altogether gone by the year 2020.
How, then, are all these businesses handling their communications? What new technology is taking the place of the humble landline? And why is it so strongly preferred by business users? Let’s take a look at how and why landlines are on the way out, and managed voice is on the rise.
Managed voice is a system which makes use of your internet connection to route voice calls, rather than routing them along a dedicated physical landline. The whole system is managed and maintained on your network by an external organization.
You might already be familiar with consumer services such as Skype, which use similar technology to enable voice and video calls over the internet. That’s only the beginning of what a robust and properly-configured managed voice system can do. Indeed, there are a host of benefits to managed voice.
First and foremost, managed voice may be significantly cheaper than your landline phone system. When making use of managed voice international calls, in particular, are significantly less expensive, and the cost of some domestic calls may become almost negligible. There are lower maintenance costs too. Adding a new phone to the network is as simple as plugging in a handset, with no need to expend money on running new wires or updating an exchange.
Not only that, but managed voice allows for completely new ways of handling calls. Employees can, with relative ease, route calls from their desk phone to their personal devices, or have voicemails delivered seamlessly to their email inbox. When using managed voice it’s relatively easy to set up phone trees, arrange voice and video conferencing and intelligently route inbound calls.
Another benefit to managed voice is how easy it is to monitor and maintain. Many providers will be able to offer you insight into the use of voice communication throughout your business, helping you to save money and make processes more efficient. And when something does go wrong, it can sometimes be fixed remotely. This means an end to lost work hours as you wait for an engineer to arrive on site to fix an issue with your landline system.
With all these advantages in mind, you may feel ready to make the jump to managed voice right away. Fortunately, the process is relatively quick, and you’ll soon be able to see the benefits of this new technology. But it’s also important to take a moment to get things set up right. You need a robust, secure network that’s capable of handling voice calls without latency. Your existing setup may be just fine, but it’s certainly worth seeking a professional opinion from a managed voice service provider.
In most cases, you won’t need to change phone numbers but may need to purchase new handsets to accommodate some of the extra functionality. While ordinary calling with managed voice is simple and intuitive, you may need to consider some training for employees for more advanced features.
Landlines are on the way out, and when you consider the advantages of managed voice for business it’s not too difficult to see why. Is managed voice the end of the landline telephone? Perhaps. But if it is, then it’s certainly a worthy successor.