Megapath’s Hosted Voice Mobile gives you the ability to have one-number VoIP calling from your desk phone, desktop computer or smartphone. The key is the one-number capability. Do you have one of those business cards with half a dozen different phone numbers? I’ll bet that confuses your customers and prospects. Hey, what are you supposed to do. You can’t be in the office all the time. Sometimes you are at your desk, sometimes you are out and about, the rest of the time you are at home. If a really important call comes in you aren’t about to quibble that you are “off duty” at home. Legacy approaches to solving this problem include having a calling service that will try to locate you, carrying a pager (very legacy), remembering to forward to your phones, one by one, when you make a move, having a secretary take messages for you and leave them on your desk or just relying on voice mail that you check all the time. None of these approaches has been ideal, but they sure beat missing a critical communication.
This is where cloud technology shines. Location doesn’t mean a thing to the cloud, because it covers all locations. With cloud services you can be anywhere and access your account in the cloud using whatever compatible device you happen to have handy. With Hosted Voice Mobile, you use an easy-to-manage Web portal that controls call routing using a single VoIP number. That’s right. You hand out one number and know that you’ll get calls to that number no matter where you happen to be.
Hosted PBX systems relieve you of the responsibility to maintain a small telephone switching system in your back room. This function moves to a much larger platform at your cloud service provider. All you have in-house are IP phones, a voice gateway that delivers telephone services, plus your mobile smartphones. The hosted system contains the functionality for such features as Find Me / Follow Me and Visual Voicemail. Now that includes your smartphone as well as your desk phone.
Megapath goes beyond some of the basic hosted PBX services to include features like HD voice for crystal clear call quality, free domestic calling that includes long distance and the ability to replicate key telephone systems.
What’s a key system? If you have a phone system that has individual buttons for all the outside phone lines, you have a key system. Key phones have lights next to each line switch so you know when the line is busy. If you want to make an outgoing call, you select an unused line. If you want to join a conversation in progress, you push the button for that line and you are conferenced in.
PBX telephone systems differ from key systems in that the PBX manages the outside lines. You don’t have the ability to pick a line and probably don’t even know how many lines there are. They are placed in a pool and assigned as needed. That’s when an incoming call comes into the system, or someone requests an outside line by dialing a number, usually “9.”
Are you feeling constrained by the limitations of your present phone system or are experiencing outages that are time consuming and expensive? Before you get a loan to buy yet another in-house phone system, check out the options available with one of the newer hosted VoIP systems. You’ll avoid large capital investments, pay per seat per month, and gain valuable features such as mobile integration that you don’t have now. Compare competitive cloud hosted communications systems with what you have now and see what you’ve been missing.
