One of the most popular choices among business and startups alike today are business-grade voice-over-IP (VoIP). Their popularity is on a constant hike because many companies today have to comply with shelter-in-place (SIP) protocols. And, the entire essence of having them is to ensure an apt social distancing through the era of the COVID-19 pandemic.

What’s even better is that VoIP excels at replicating the extensive business PBX functionality for a fraction of money. It also helps with cost savings as it reduces the burden by billing monthly.

Thus, VoIP is an excellent platform for facilitating communication needs, especially during work from home settings. Also, with VoIP, businesses are reaping the benefits of greater flexibility as once only the phone calls are now data. Also, features like video-conferencing, messaging, file-sharing have made their usage even more critical.

Now that you’ve decided to upgrade your VoIP service and are contemplating the criteria, here are some tips to ease your process. Yes, reading on, you’ll discover the know-how of choosing the best phone system for your business needs. Let’s get going:

• Pricing and Plans:
  

One of the primary determining factors is cost. After all, what good is choosing a VoIP service for your business with all bells and whistles if that’s pocket-digging?

There are a lot of large companies that offer business VoIP services. Thus, the phone systems space is crowded and competitive. Also, the abundance of choices and highly competitive advertising nature makes it daunting for business owners to find the best VoIP provider. So, your wise decision can be to list the top 10 voip providers and select the most appropriate based on their features.

For instance, some services may offer introductory and intermediate pricing but may be limited to 20 users and lack integrations. However, the other cheaper model may not transcribe voice messages, and your system may not record all calls.

Thus, the phone system experts suggest stopping focusing on the price and consider the much-needed features. Check the features your VoIP provider offers and then consider the price implications down the road. From there, it’ll just be comparison shopping.

• Call Management:
  

With the maturity of VoIP platforms, the feature sets become tailored for specific audiences. And, this means that the chances of finding the same capabilities in products that compete directly with one another may not be available. Call management is an excellent example. It is an umbrella term for almost all a system does with a typical phone call.

For instance, if you have large volumes of calls that come into a particular set of phone numbers, the call queuing feature may intelligently distribute calls between extensions. This system usually is based on geography, availability, or other criteria.

• Security:
  

One of the pivotal yet must-consider factors that helps choose an apt VoIP is security.

Know that security is an excellent factor for every cloud-based service, which plugs into any business. And, providers ignoring this aspect are considered as the worst voip providers by cautious business owners.

An application that connects to the internet as VoIP serves as the hub for business communications. And, that’s why inside-out security measures hold paramount importance.

Thereby, ensure doing your due diligence on VoIP providers for knowing data storage responsibilities in a cloud-based service. Also, try negotiating the decided security terms in your contract. Make sure you look for services that offer end-to-end encryption and not just basic authentication.

After all, it’s about your business security.

The Bottom Line

Unified communications, support, third party integration and call management are some more tips that help you make a decision.

Know that every business’s needs are different, and how they prefer communicating are also different. Thus, determine your business needs and research all the features you’re looking for while choosing the best VoIP for your enterprise.