Today businesses are looking to boost up thier communication capabilities. The demand for hosted communication solutions such as cloud telephony and a hosted VoIP phone system has gone up. Businesses implementing a hosted Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone system for the first time or migrating from an old VoIP system to a new one, both scenarios involve a significant amount of planning and effort to derive the best possible outcome. However, this is not a one-way solution as it requires involvement from both management and employees.
They will have to adopt new and improved methods of working that’ll include better planning and monitoring. This may not be easy to opt for, but they’ll most certainly have a positive impact on the business processes in terms of improved productivity and workflow. On the other hand, many factors can impact the outcome quality of your VoIP service and a few factors that a business can work upon to improve it.
Here’s a list of best practices that you can follow while setting up a new or upgrading your VoIP solution.
1. Recheck your network architecture
One of the basics to check beforehand; you have to ensure that your network infrastructure supports your preferred VoIP system. And even if it does, you have to be prepared to make changes, possibly significant ones, to ensure the best performance. Such a check is required because not every switch, router, firewall or security equipment will work with all VoIP provided by different service providers. There will be times when you may need to reconfigure or update a device and even then, you may find that your VoIP software simply doesn’t work unless you change some hardware. Therefore, you may want to understand all these aspects before you invest any money.
2. Check your capability
To ensure the quality of the call and other features supported by VoIP, you have to check that your network supports the call quality required by VoIP. Just because all your equipment is working fine, that doesn’t mean your employees are having top quality conversations.
You need to ensure that you have sufficient bandwidth but you cannot ignore prioritisation as well. This means that your infrastructure must be able to support the quality of service with regards to your VoIP traffic.
You need to understand that voice traffic is quite sensitive to aspects such as packet loss and jitters and a network that works fine for data, may not work equally great for voice despite not generating any errors. This requires real-world testing under additional traffic load to rigorously test the call quality.
3. Give Importance to your management/monitoring strategy
You also need to ensure that your network monitoring software supports VoIP. Whether it is daily backups that suck up a lot of bandwidth or a misconfigured router, both are not able to handle the quality of service. In the case of softphone apps that are being deployed on employees’ mobile phones, you need to ensure that your Mobile Device Management (MDM) solution can help you monitor those apps. Also, you need to ensure that your management tools are optimised for your long-term VoIP strategy, instead of just worrying about setting it up once.
4. Focus on your handset deployment
You need to ensure that your physical infrastructure such as mobile phones, routers, etc. supports your VoIP plans. The best way to go about it is to opt for a dedicated Ethernet that connects each VoIP phone. Although it is not a must for smaller networks, but it’s a quality addition for larger networks that have to cater to multiple connections spread across a vast geographical area. In addition, you also need to confirm with your Internet Service Provider (ISP) that they support VoIP and prioritisation.
Although hosted phone systems already eliminate all the major responsibilities such as maintenance and upgrade and they also reduce the expenditure, but managing a hosted phone service isn’t a minor task. You need to be able to manage a whole number of things and keep an eye on the overall process to make it perform optimally. You just have to understand that there is a lot to know and you can always optimise and improve the quality of service that you are receiving with only a few tweaks and monitoring.
When talking about small business VoIP providers in Australia, BUS ICT is one of the leading effective and scalable business communication services providers in Australia. The company offers tailor-made hosted VoIP service solutions for unique business requirements. BUS ICT is also one of the few fibrenet providers with long experience in facilitating solutions for business communications.