By now, Voice-over-IP (VoIP) should be familiar to most business technology buyers. Its low cost, as compared to on-premises PBX systems, has made it the modern standard for basic business voice calling. More recently, VoIP delivered as a cloud service has driven down costs even further. But VoIP has other advantages, too. Because it’s software-based, it can integrate with other software systems to power multiple communications channels, beyond just voice. This capability has led to the emergence of a new category of VoIP-based business communications software, known as Unified Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS).
The goal of UCaaS is not just to add new features to voice calling, but to elevate business communications beyond what we expect of traditional phone technology. UCaaS systems aim to integrate voice with the software your business relies upon most, creating multi-channel delivery systems that help drive productivity. And while that might sound complex and potentially hard to manage, it needn’t be, so long as you focus on your organization’s actual needs and don’t allow yourself to be boggled by the extensive menus of options that vendors might have on offer.
While VoIP is usually just a voice service provider, handling inbound and outbound voice calls, UCaaS seeks to take all business communications and route them over internet protocol (IP). It’s multi-modal, incorporating text messaging, chats, video conferencing, screen sharing, video meetings, and more. But it starts with VoIP to power the voice part.
As you can see from data provided by market research firm Statista in the chart below, the overall market for UCaaS is growing. The projected trend is for the majority of customers to choose a hosted/managed solution within the next couple of years.
In this deep dive, we’ll take a look at the features you can expect from plain-Jane VoIP providers, including the winners in our most recent PCMag Business Choice Awards for VoIP survey. Then we’ll dig into how UCaaS vendors build upon and extend basic VoIP features to deliver more robust communications platforms for your business.
What VoIP Gives You
At its core, VoIP is a digital telephone service that uses the internet for transport and delivery of communications. You can make and receive calls from your internet connection via handsets, as you would in most traditional office settings, or optionally via softphone applications on PCs or devices.
VoIP offers many of the same features as a traditional telco service provider. You can receive and listen to voicemail messages, monitor calls via caller ID, and forward calls to alternate lines if the receiver isn’t available. Other features that may not be available with vanilla telco phone plans include auto-attendants, call holds, call logs, call monitoring, call recording, call transcriptions, dial-in conferencing, and number porting.
Networking Considerations
One caveat of VoIP, even for services that are delivered and managed via the cloud, is that it can be taxing to your local area network. With VoIP enabled, your network can become flooded with voice traffic from PCs and VoIP-enabled desktop phones, not to mention smartphones, tablets, and other devices. And it’s not just the volume of traffic that’s the problem; the biggest concern is that VoIP traffic requires special attention.
Normal data traffic can withstand brief network slowdowns and occasional packet loss, latency, and network jitter. VoIP traffic doesn’t like any of those things and tends to react badly to them. You may experience audible breaks in your conversations or even dropped calls. All the best VoIP providers can assign you customer service engineers to help. However, you’ll still need on-staff IT professionals on your side, and managing VoIP traffic will take up a good deal of their time, especially during the initial roll-out of the service.
Bear in mind, too, that if this is true when you turn simple voice communications into data streams, the challenges only grow when you add more channels, which is precisely what happens when you deploy UCaaS.
Stepping Up to UCaaS
UCaaS starts with voice, but as the name implies, it adds value by offering other channels, too. Most notably, this means video, where you’ll be able to schedule one-on-one video calls as well as one-to-many video conferences.
At one time, these capabilities might not have seemed all that critical for smaller companies, but in the age of the Covid-19 pandemic and hybrid remote workforces, they’ve become must-haves. With video conferencing and VoIP, you’ll be able to conduct meetings with hundreds of attendants, share your screen with everyone attending, and even share and receive files to everyone on the call or to individual attendants.
UCaaS tools also let you chat and exchange text messages with coworkers, which has become an essential feature for remote workforces. For example, if you’re on a video call with a client and your sales rep is speaking out of turn, then you can send them a private chat message to get everyone on the same page. This also lets your team members send chat messages rather than emails to discuss more time-sensitive and more casual interactions.
Some UCaaS providers allow for deep collaboration and group project management. This includes document sharing and simultaneous editing, to-do lists, shared calendars, and even joint file storage.
And if you’re the type of Neanderthal who still needs to send and receive faxes, some UCaaS solutions let you do so from your computer or mobile device. Typically, faxes can be automatically stored in your Dropbox or Microsoft OneDrive account. Managing faxes digitally also gives you better oversight over who is sending and receiving faxes and what they’re faxing. Most systems also give you tools to help block junk faxes.
Top-Rated Enterprise VoIP Vendors with UCaaS Features
The UCaaS Advantage: Integration
However, perhaps the most important aspect of a UCaaS platform is its ability to integrate with third-party solutions and help import and export data from tool to tool. For example, if your UCaaS tool integrates with your Salesforce account, you can view customers’ interaction histories, launch calls directly from your Salesforce dashboard, and add notes about what is said during the call. Similarly, a Microsoft Outlook integration can parse incoming emails for phone numbers and let you launch calls from within the application.
Integrations are especially useful for companies that plan to use their UCaaS tool to respond to help desk tickets. The ability to make and take calls directly within the help desk console is incredibly powerful. Imagine giving help desk staff the ability to research customer interactions or add notes to customer records while on the call, and then tie this data back across your UCaaS, help desk, and customer relationship management (CRM) tools for later edification.
Top-Rated Small Business VoIP Services with UCaaS Capability
That’s because most vendors offer bulk discounts when you bundle all of your UCaaS tools together, rather than cherry-picking communications tools across multiple vendors. Think about how you buy your home’s cable, internet, and phone service: the price of all three together will typically be less than going with a different vendor for each.
Bundling also guarantees that each service integrates and reports back to the others without issue. If, on the other hand, you have separate vendors for VoIP, video, and chat, there’s no guarantee that they’ll work well together.
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