Much has been written about the cost saving aspects of VOIP and while these arguments are valid and contribute to the business case for the adoption of the technology, they are by no means the only business benefits that may be derived from the deployment of the technology.
Savings realised by an IP telephony deployment can be summarised into four main categories: multi-site networking savings, network management and maintenance savings, physical infrastructure savings, and softer cost reductions driven by applications.
In addition to reducing costs, IP is helping organisations improve business communications and customer service.
Today`s business environment demands that we are constantly striving to improve customer service. Customer response is directly related to the speed of decision-making, which is in turn related to the ability to communicate in real-time, irrespective of location. IP telephony facilitates location independent real-time communications.
In addition, there is a need for extended and flexible working hours and the ability to work from any location at any time. There is a need to provide workers with the same facilities in their home office as they have from their enterprise location as well as offering workers enhanced communications facilities irrespective of their location within the enterprise.
The real-time enterprise is an expression designed to describe an organisation that makes rapid decisions because the appropriate people can communicate immediately with access to up-to-date information they can share with anyone, anywhere, instantly facilitating rapid, informed decision-making.
To be a real-time enterprise, organisations need to become a networked businesses with personnel becoming networked employees.
By leveraging IP telephony, organisations can seamlessly and cost-effectively extend corporate phone features and IP-based applications to employees regardless of location, encouraging better communication and collaboration. These include advanced mobility services that marry the capabilities of a fixed, wireless and mobile network into a seamless communications infrastructure, allowing the use of the appropriate communications mechanism dependant on location. Furthermore, by linking work locations together, organisations can avoid or reduce the cost of equipping smaller sites with the same capabilities as larger sites.
Similarly, IP telephony enables many possibilities in the customer-service arena. Contact centres, for example, can take advantage of customer defined interactions such as click-to-talk and Web call back, and can exploit collaborative communication such as content push, whiteboard sessions and video conferencing. Using IP-based teleworker solutions, contact centre agents can be deployed remotely, enabling expansion of contact centre operations across multiple geographies and time zones, and increased scheduling flexibility.
Teleworking also provides enterprise communication functionality to the small office/home office environment.
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