Best VoIP Service Placerville 

Finding the best VoIP service partner in Placerville

After the quality of your IT infrastructure (in-house or hosted), your choice of VoIP service partner will almost certainly be the most important factor in determining the success of your transition to VoIP. With that in mind, here is a quick guide to finding the best VoIP service partner in Placerville.

Start by analyzing your current and predicted phone usage 

“Phones” means both landlines and cell phones. The chances are that you’ll only be able to eliminate the former. It is, however, recommended to see if there’s any way you can shift traffic from cell phones to VoIP phones. You probably won’t be able to get rid of your cell phones completely, but their running costs can be so high that anything you can do to reduce them is likely to be very welcome, especially if you can apply the change to multiple user accounts.

If you have fax machines check their usage too 

If you’re still using traditional fax machines, then using a VoIP implementation as a chance to switch to Fax over IP (efax) will not only help save you money on calling costs (and printing costs) but also allow you to reclaim space in your office. Modern efax systems are likely to be secure enough for just about any business, plus the “print-on-demand” approach stops faxes from getting lost or read without authorization.

Discuss what advanced functionality, if any, you’d like to add and at what point 

For many SMBs, it makes complete sense to start with a “bare-bones” implementation of VoIP (and possibly Fax over IP) so they start benefiting from the lower call charges. They can then move on to add additional functionality if it adds value to their business. VoIP’s flexibility makes it easy to scale (up and down). You do, however, have to ensure that you have adequate bandwidth and that your VoIP service vendor can support whatever it is that you want to do.

Request VoIP

In simple terms, you can expect any decent VoIP service vendor to be able to support “bread-and-butter” features such as conference-calling, call-recording, and video-calling. They’ll probably also support some level of third-party integration. That said, you definitely want to check to be on the safe side. If, however, you’re interested in really pushing the functionality of VoIP as far as it will go, then your choice of VoIP service vendors is likely to be more limited.

Think about whether you’d prefer to use softphones or VoIP handsets (or both) 

The key point to remember about softphones is that most of the time, you’re still going to need to invest in hardware to make them work. In most office environments, headsets will be the only realistic option and they’ll need to be of a fairly decent quality. This means that softphones aren’t necessarily quite as affordable or as space-saving as you might initially think. That said, they still tend to work out more affordable and compact than VoIP handsets.

On the other hand, VoIP handsets free up screen real estate and are much less likely to be accidentally dialed. They also look and feel like regular phones which may ease the path to adoption with some staff.

In either case, it’s best to test your options thoroughly before committing to a purchase. If you’re planning on using softphones, it’s a good idea to test how they perform on mobile devices, especially if this is likely to be important to you, as standards can vary, to put it mildly. If you’re going to go for VoIP handsets, you’ll need to decide whether to buy them yourselves or look for a contract that includes them.

Make a shortlist of vendors who meet your requirements and standards 

By this point, you should have a fairly clear idea of your requirements both now and in the future. Obviously, the more of your future requirements a VoIP service vendor can meet, the less likely you are to need to change in the future. Although changing VoIP service vendors is generally a lot less hassle than changing from one traditional telco to another, it is still a disruption you’d probably prefer to avoid and it can be particularly frustrating if you’re generally happy with the VoIP service vendor you are already using.

“Standards” basically means quality of service, security and compliance, and customer support and service. Never compromise on any of these, no matter how tight your budget. It’s better to implement a reduced number of functions at high quality than to get all the functions you (think you) want but implemented badly.

If you’d like to speak to one of the best VoIP service partners in Placerville, please click here now to contact Salient IT.