How Does SIP Trunking Affect your Business?

VoIP is often described in superlatives – it is very cheap, it will supercharge your phone system, it will change the way you work and so on. You can find articles online that sing paeans to SIP trunking or hosted VoIP (or both, occasionally). There are entire websites dedicated to showing readers how wonderful VoIP or SIP is for businesses.

But many people still have very little knowledge of how SIP trunks can help their business or organization. They think of VoIP in purely utilitarian terms, almost as if it is nothing more than say electricity, water or gas. That may have been the case with older PSTN T1 lines – it was very much a set it and forget it type of system.

However, SIP trunks and VoIP deployments by extension are a very different beast. Both perform the same function – let you make and receive phone calls but that is pretty much where the similarities end. One of the main limitations of PSTN networks is that they are standalone, they operate independently of any other system and have their own set of standards and protocols.

This was not such a big deal for the previous century when it was the dominant network for communication around the world. But with the rise of IP based technologies – like email and cloud computing – the lack of interoperability became an obstacle for enterprises. VoIP technology allowed companies could finally connect different communication systems. We can easily move data around and no significant information is lost because it is locked in a particular software, device or app.

Why Companies Prefer SIP Trunks

The benefits of SIP trunking are many but not every feature will be appropriate for your particular business. The most wanted features for a customer care center will be different from what a small consulting company needs. But it is this very flexibility that makes SIP trunks so much more popular. Every company can make it fit their requirements, they don’t have to change business processes around to fit the quirks and limitations of the existing model.

Normally new technology is expensive to implement, especially for business organizations. SIP trunks on the other hand often turn out to be cheaper than PSTN phone systems from traditional operators. They also come with fewer strings attached like long term contracts or expensive maintenance requirements. No wonder SIP trunking adoption is growing quickly among enterprises.

How Can SIP Trunking Change Your Business?

SIP trunks affect your business in many different ways. Some of the effects are more direct and visible while others fly under the radar. Some benefits are immediately apparent but others only show up after some time. For instance, the first benefit any business will see is that their monthly bills for phone calls will go down. Depending on how much you use the phones, it may very well be a substantial difference. Even a small reduction can be very significant for a medium business while larger organizations will surely appreciate the large savings in their bills.

Companies are familiar with investing in new technology and the long time it can take to implement new projects. But SIP trunks do not take that long to set up and deploy. Thanks to intense competition among SIP trunking vendors, there has been a race to innovate the most user friendly SIP service for companies. Now setting up SIP trunks to handle your voice calls is almost as hassle free as using hosted VoIP!

Long-Term and Less Apparent Benefits

Longer term benefits include improved productivity and better collaboration between users. You can integrate SIP trunks with many other modern enterprise systems such as email, faxing, voicemail and so on. This means your employees can configure their individual settings so that they never miss a call. They can send voicemail messages directly to their email, you can send faxes from your desk etc. The possibilities are practically endless.

Quite a few companies are using SIP trunks as a stepping stone or foundation for future unified communication efforts as well. It means that all of a company’s communication channels will be connected together. They will have a unified interface and can share user status where needed like when someone is busy or when they are free to take calls.

You can also integrate SIP trunks services with other types of enterprise software. For instance, some providers offer plugins or addons to integrate with Salesforce, the popular CRM service. Users can call customers from within the software itself and not have to change context. Once the call is done the details are automatically captured for the user, no manual intervention needed. All of this basically frees up your employees to spend more time in adding value to the company instead of wasting it on mundane tasks. These are but a few of the changes you can see due to SIP trunking.