If you’ve heard the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, you’re no doubt familiar with the Goldilocks Principle, the notion that something has to lie within a certain range to be ideal. Too far one direction, and your porridge is too hot/cold, your chair too stiff/fluffy, your bed too hard/soft.
This principle creeps up a lot when it comes to making important purchasing decisions for your business. It’s not just a matter of meeting your most basic needs, but truly satisfying those needs with the optimal solution that fits your budget. This is especially the case in the world of business telephony, where the available solutions run the gamut from “free” to absolutely budget-breaking. Making the right choice involves finding that happy medium for your business. And here’s why, for SMBs, that solution is a hosted VoIP phone system…
The “Über Cheap” Solution
On the low end of the spectrum you have the free or practically-free business phone solutions, with quasi dial tone, limited or no technical support, terrible reliability, and a feature list you can count on one hand. You’ll see these providers pushing their service as being the most affordable, but just how long can your business afford to sound unprofessional or operate inefficiently?
Don’t get me wrong, these solutions serve a purpose and have an audience among those one-man shops who don’t care or can’t afford to care about how well they communicate with their customers. If you find yourself in that position, though, you may be better off running your business from your cell phone. You’re paying for it already, and odds are it knows more tricks than one of these freebie services. Or, even better, spring for a whopping $10 / month and get a real virtual phone system with features that provide an honest ROI.
Put simply, using a free phone service for your business is a road to disaster and will almost certainly cost you more in wasted time, lost business, and lost opportunities than it saves. But hey, at least you won’t have to ask for your money back when the wheels come off.
The “There Goes My Budget” Solution
While spending too little on your business phone system can be a disaster, spending too much is a downright shame. And yet, time after time, small business owners drop tens of thousands of dollars on premise PBX equipment just to stuff it in a closet and pray that it lasts a year or two. This is to say nothing of how much it costs to support the beastly thing, to replace equipment, to make upgrades, to hire IT staff, and to scale with your growing needs.
If you’ve fallen for this in the past, it’s not completely your fault. You’re up against decades of conditioning that a premise PBX is the only option, and there’s an army of desperate premise PBX providers out there ready to sell you that same bill of goods. They’ll say you need all that equipment. They’ll tell you that you want to have your servers / call switch at your location, with your IT staff working on it. But unless you’re a vast enterprise with people to spare and dollars to burn, it’s simply not true.
There is another way, a better way. You can get all of the same bells and whistles with better support, scalability, and flexibility for a price that won’t make you flinch. Read on.
The “Just Right” Solution
Hosted VoIP phone systems are, hands-down, the champions of the coveted middle-of-the-road when it comes to business phone service. Perhaps middle-of-the-road sounds a little lackluster. How about, “has-absolutely-everything-you-could-want-or-need-at-a-price-you-can-afford”. Much better.
Without spending a penny on a premise wall switch or on-site server, you get remote-managed phone service with robust features like an auto attendant, ACD call routing, call queuing, professional voicemail extensions, call park, recorded calls, integration with Outlook and Salesforce, online visual call reports, and much more. We’re talking a professional grade service at a cost that is typically an order of magnitude lower than a traditional solution.
Need to grow your business? Good on ya, mate. With a hosted VoIP PBX, scaling up is as easy as plugging in new phones at any number of new locations, configuring them online, and watching them boot up with live dial tone.
Powerful, reliable, scalable, and affordable. In other words, just right.
