Five Telephony Restrictions You Can Overcome with VoIP or a Unified Communiation Business Phone System

AccuVoIP Services and Star2Star solution  were able to reduce 10,000 analog phone lines down to 3,000 virtual lines for a major retail chain. How much can Star2Star save you? Answer 4 simple questions and find out http://stwb.co/erauph

Many businesses today are still struggling with the inflexibility, unreliability, and expense of their existing legacy phone systems. After all, 40 percent of small businesses still operate using traditional phone lines, according to an AccessDirect survey. However, considerable gains are to be had by upgrading your business phone system, gains that are already being enjoyed by companies that have embraced a modern hosted VoIP business communications infrastructure enhanced with unified communications (UC).

In this blog, we will highlight the top telephony restrictions you can overcome with a new phone system, including some of the myriad benefits of UC and the perks of cloud-based VoIP telephony. Together, these contemporary technologies will bring your organization forward into a world of reliable, productive, and efficient corporate communications and collaboration.

Here are five restrictions of a traditional PBX:

1. Missed phone calls: Don’t expect your traveling salespeople to close deals at the rate at which your competitors do if they don’t have access to the same solutions that enable remote work capabilities. UC can bring an ability to forward calls made to desk phones to smartphones using Find Me/Follow Me call routing to your sales team’s tool kit. Additionally, voice messages can be delivered to email addresses as an attachment with a reminder notification sent to phones.

1. Expensive repairs and maintenance: With a hosted VoIP business phone system, companies are no longer bound to the exorbitant costs associated with installation, maintenance, and repairs that come with managing on-premises telephony solutions. Instead, many aspects of managing your new system can be offloaded to a first-rate provider. These include support requirements (provided 24/7/365), software updates that are free and automatic, and quick replacement of broken parts (even for parts damaged through natural disaster).

1. Unreliability and downtime: Your new hosted VoIP solution should come replete with automatic backup and failover. Never again will your business feel the heat of customer defection caused by the unavailability of your communications system—not when your hosted provider is in charge of keeping your platform up and running. A best-in-class provider will continuously monitor the health of your phone system; if a problem is detected, redundant Internet connections and data centers will be available to circumvent disruptions. In the case of a disaster, any outage at your office will be covered by quickly and easily rerouting calls to designated employees, cell phones, landlines, or other office locations.

1. Business disconnects during travel: With the right hosted VoIP business phone system, your company no longer has to deal with disruptions to employee productivity due to travel. Many phone systems include UC conferencing capabilities, such as a company directory for easily selecting participants and sending invitations via on-screen notifications. Some solutions also include a white board within the videoconference for viewers to collectively edit any document. Other UC tools that will enhance collaboration among disparate employees include instant text messaging, fax receipt, and delivery and call management.

1. Costly carrier fees: A hosted VoIP system will allow you to cut your monthly phone bills by up to 50 percent. A line pooling feature, for example, will enable your business to share a single set of lines among all its locations, reducing the number of lines for which you must pay. Best-in-class systems and equipment will also run on less power than a legacy system, reducing your power bill.

To receive these benefits and many more, look no further than hosted VoIP/UC provider AccuVoIP Services. http://www.accuvoipservices.com/contact/ for more information about what makes us the best choice to deliver your cloud-based phone system.

Make the Switch to Star2Star
Switching to Star2Star is easy. Just contact your Star2Star re-seller at AccuVoIP Services. Contact http://www.accuvoipservices.com/ at 262-649-1097 They’ll analyze your current situation and expenses and show you exactly how much money you’ll save with Star2Star. In most cases, you can even keep your old phone numbers.

Is Your CRM in the Cloud Yet? Better Get to It

What can you do with AccuVoIP Services and Star2Star? • Boost productivity by uniting satellite offices, mobile users, and work-at-home employees into a single, unified system with a single dialing plan. http://stwb.co/splcee

We all know that a robust customer relationship management (CRM) system is the backbone of sales and marketing productivity. Introduced in the 1980s, these relationship management solutions provide businesses with the means to efficiently store, process, and organize customer contact information. What you may not know is that moving your CRM to the cloud can magnify the benefits of CRM, making this move a fast-growing trend today.

A CRM system can generate the many reports (e.g., automated quotes and mail merges) that help us to fine-tune our customer deliverables, but taking full advantage of the software’s benefits requires the power of the cloud. The benefits of cloud-based CRM include unifying your CRM with a cloud-based unified communications (UC) solution for your organization.

If you haven’t moved towards this trend, consider doing so a tactical necessity to keep aligned with your competitors. A majority of businesses have already taken, or plan to take, advantage of the many benefits of CRM software deployed in the cloud. As a matter of fact, Gartner predicts that SaaS deployments of CRM will reach over 50 percent by year-end.

Why is this? Many companies find that cloud-based CRM saves them money in maintenance and upgrades. IT staff demands will go down. The platform allows for optimal growth (or even downsizing).

After you catch up, keep up by staying abreast of the following ongoing CRM trends:

• Collaboration: Never before has greater attention been paid to the importance of sales/marketing alignment. Having a robust CRM platform allows the two departments to centralize shared data, which was typically siloed before.
• Mobile: With the workforce becoming increasingly mobile, it’s imperative for employees to have access to their customer data anywhere at any location. Cloud-based CRM systems grant salespeople and marketers access to their CRM systems while on the road, aiding them in closing deals, preparing for meetings, and reporting accurately.

To reap the greatest rewards from cloud-based CRM, you’ll need the assistance of a provider with a powerful UC and CRM integration system. For this functionality, look no further than http://www.accuvoipservices.com/services/. We provide a rich suite of UC features, including voice, chat, video, presence management, and more, in a single, easy-to-use platform. Using ourhttp://www.accuvoipservices.com/services/crm-integration/ technology solution, you can easily access those features to help agents interact more effectively with your customers, leading to improved retention rates and profitability.

StarContact allows you to arrange, track and administer all of your customer data, activities, and discussions, supported by our integrated call reporting and analytics. This allows for enhanced customer service, including “screen pops” that appear with incoming calls to provide agents with information on the customers’ previous calls, orders, and other activities with your brand.

This integration of your communications and CRM systems also empowers you to monitor employee performance via an online dashboard, so you can track beneficial and not-so-beneficial exchanges and improve customer interactions down the line. Take advantage of Star2Star’s simple and effective communications service that runs all of your communications through the same framework so they interact seamlessly.

Make the Switch to Star2Star
Switching to Star2Star is easy. Just contact your Star2Star re-seller at AccuVoIP Services. Contact http://www.accuvoipservices.com/ at 262-649-1097 They’ll analyze your current situation and expenses and show you exactly how much money you’ll save with Star2Star. In most cases, you can even keep your old phone numbers.

Local Unified Communications and VoIP Provider Service Level Agreements in Wisconsin

What can you do with Star2Star? • Boost productivity by uniting satellite offices, mobile users, and work-at-home employees into a single, unified system with a single dialing plan. http://stwb.co/splcee

Though much has been made of the power of modern communications channels (think instant messaging, e-mail, SMS, even social media), the fact of the matter is voice is still the lifeblood of many enterprises. When it comes to call quality and reliability, and management and security, businesses can’t afford to leave that up to chance, particularly when it comes to mission-critical conversations with customers and business partners.

Service-level agreements have gone a long way to reassuring end users that they’re getting the reliable voice service that they’re used to when transitioning from the POTS to VoIP. SLAs for standalone VoIP have been a fixture in the last four or five years, helping speed business owners’ comfort levels. As unified communications is increasingly adopted, the focus on reliability across a distributed footprint (and at times unmanaged links) has become even more laser-like for business owners.

When evaluating quality metrics for VoIP, it’s important to remember how calls are delivered. They’re broken up into small packets of information, which are then sent out over IP networks, each finding its own path through the Internet (or a private network). The packets are then reassembled at the destination in the correct order.

There are a few things that can affect the quality of real-time VoIP communications. For end users, these come across in the form of echoes, choppiness, and delay. Typically, these call quality issues are seen when calls are made over the public Internet, which is an unmanaged network. Using applications like Skype and other UC voice functions means that calls are at the mercy of the vacillations in traffic and ISP capacity. When the transmission network is overloaded or bandwidth is too slow, it can result in packet loss, latency (packets arriving late), and jitter (packets being reassembled in the wrong order).

It’s important to keep in mind that when UC applications are implemented over managed connections, it allows that UC provider to MANAGE the connections. This is the typical approach taken by both cloud-based and premise-based UC solutions.

That said, not all managed approaches are created equal.

There’s a certain other UC provider out there that recently announced what it called an “industry first,” guaranteeing 99.99 percent SLA compliance (what we call “4 nines”). It’s worth noting that Star2Star can guarantee voice call quality across the unified communications footprint with 5 nines (99.999 percent)—when you consider this along with Star2Star’s failover capabilities, this is even better than POTS for reliability—thanks to the unique approach that we take to UC deployment.

Star2Star delivers the benefits of both on-premise and cloud deployments, with a blended architecture that consists of an on-premise StarBox™ Cloud Connection Manager and a suite of cloud-based services hosted at highly-reliable, redundant data centers.

Most hosted solutions have on-premise hardware, just as Star2Star does. But the difference between Star2Star’s StarBox™ Cloud Connection Manager (CCM) and competitors’ hardware is what’s inside. Our StarBox™ Cloud Connection Manager takes the place of a typical edge device, while also providing numerous additional features like built-in quality-of-service and call control.

Know about VoIP quality when talking to customers and potential customers. To find out more about our 5-nines reliability guarantee and what else makes us different, click here.

Make the Switch to Star2Star
Switching to Star2Star is easy. Just contact your Star2Star re-seller at AccuVoIP Services. Contact http://www.accuvoipservices.com/ at 262-649-1097 They’ll analyze your current situation and expenses and show you exactly how much money you’ll save with Star2Star. In most cases, you can even keep your old phone numbers.

VoIP the Next Era of Unified Communication

Star2Star was able to reduce 10,000 analog phone lines down to 3,000 virtual lines for a major retail chain. How much can Star2Star save you? Answer 4 simple questions and find out http://stwb.co/erauph

As voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) continues to replace traditional phone systems across the business world, the way companies communicate has become much more flexible and personalized. Gone are the days of having a single desk phone with a single phone number that only rings to that line. Now, users have many devices and methods to choose from: a desk phone, smartphone, home phone, laptop, softphone client, instant messaging, fax, email, videoconferencing, conference calling, and more. More importantly, users want to be accessible from all of them in a centralized way.

The best way to centralize business communications is through the implementation of a unified communications (UC) solution. As the name implies, UC solutions unite various communications methods and devices into a single system. The best UC solutions even make everything accessible from a single interface or user portal. While UC can be adopted painlessly and quickly, problems can develop if a business isn’t fully committed. Research firm UCStrategies points out that when implementing UC solution, management issues can often get in the way of realizing the true potential of moving from a line-centric to a user-centric world.

“This wide range of capabilities and devices has meant that the traditional line-centric [management] approach doesn’t work anymore,” the firm noted. “[For instance], where change used to happen only when a user moved offices, now a multiplicity of user and business events through the lifecycle that drive change, which can result in ten or a hundred times as many changes.”

Although smaller organizations may utilize fewer business communication tools, UC adoption still can be very challenging, as there are often separate configuration and management interfaces for different tools. These challenges are exacerbated for those companies that have either a very small IT department or no dedicated IT staff.

Many organizations do not have a plan in place to manage this dramatic increase in sophistication or fully utilize the powerful new tools they have at their disposal, and instead simply continue to use the methods they have in the past. These methods include manual processes where trained and experienced individuals perform sophisticated configurations based on business rules for each event after receiving a work request to do so. A particularly difficult challenge to overcome is mindset and comfort. Many employees, including those in the highest levels of management, may be resistant to change or unwilling to learn a new system. They may consciously choose to continue doing things the way that they’ve always been done, without seeing how a few small changes could dramatically improve the way they do business.

Although theoretically designed to eliminate these problems, UC vendor management systems are typically little better; UCstrategies explained that they’re still device-centric and limited to capabilities such as simple directory integration. Luckily, there are ways to ease UC adoption and make it faster and easier for users to take full advantage of the many advanced features that are only possible with UC.

Star2Star Communications has made significant strides in this area through the development of specialized communications hardware. Star2Star’s StarBox™ Cloud Communication Manager takes the place of a typical edge device, while also providing numerous additional features like built-in quality-of-service and call control, security, and granular management and reporting.

Technology like the StarBox™ Cloud Connection Manager makes it possible for an entire system to be managed end-to-end with integration into the full lifecycle of events. Management and integration eliminates a number of problems, including excessively high costs, over-provisioning of resources and licenses, failure to decommission unused assets, frequent updates and cost for minor changes to system integrator-provided solutions, and increased staff overtime.

Other methods can also be utilized to make a UC solution more user-centric. A single, easy-to-use interface that provides access to all features is critical. Accommodations such as key-system emulation that make a system operate more like older systems with which users are familiar can make the transition much simpler. 24/7/365 system monitoring and technical support both reduce the likelihood of problems developing and quickly resolve them in the unlikely event that they occur.

Advanced communications solutions can transform a business by dramatically reducing costs, simplifying processes, improving efficiency, reducing IT demands, and improving how employees connect internally and externally. However, these benefits can be realized only if the solution is deployed and operated in an efficient and cost-effective manner. Organizations need to make sure that they choose a solution that meets their needs and solves their problems, and they also need to commit to making the internal changes necessary to fully utilize it.

Make the Switch to Star2Star
Switching to Star2Star is easy. Just contact your Star2Star re-seller at AccuVoIP Services. Contact http://www.accuvoipservices.com/ at 262-649-1097 They’ll analyze your current situation and expenses and show you exactly how much money you’ll save with Star2Star. In most cases, you can even keep your old phone numbers.