Last year, the world was forced to work from home. For many businesses, it took time to adapt to the change in working practices. This included, for some, their communications as phone lines that were hard-wired to receive calls in the office struggled to provide adequate communication lines. Those organisations that did not manage to solve their communications issues should look to Microsoft 365 Business Voice to solve their problems. But what is Business Voice, and how does it allow businesses to communicate better than ever?
Microsoft 365 Business Voice is the newest addition to the Microsoft suite of applications. A Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone system, it transforms Microsoft Teams into an all-in-one communications platform by bringing together calling, chat and meetings into one service.
Perfect for small-to-medium-sized businesses, Business Voice simplifies communication with your colleagues, customers and suppliers, by giving you a clear interface that makes it easy for people to connect. But how does Business Voice manage it?
Flexibility
As a VoIP platform, Microsoft 365 Business Voice is managed over a data network. This allows it to be accessible from anywhere, providing you have the right credentials! This is much more preferable, not only in the current climate, but in the future too – while many businesses are remote working now, it is hard to predict just how long it will be until workplaces are fully staffed five days a week once again, if they ever will be.
Compared to Private Branch Exchange (PBX) phone lines, which are hard-wired at a business’ offices, the differences between the two are large. These types of phone systems only work in an office, and are the reason why so many businesses found problems with their communication lines during lockdown – routing calls to people working at home proved very difficult!
This makes the flexibility Business Voice offers key. Call plans can even be scaled to fit your business needs, with rates set for calling both international and national numbers. Licenses can be added to account for any new recruits to the business.
Integration
Existing Microsoft 365 users will be delighted to read that as well as integrating seamlessly with Teams, Business Voice integrates with other Microsoft 365 applications. Outlook is utilised, with the out of office/away functions transferring across to Business Voice to mark a user’s extension as unavailable. This is particularly useful for larger businesses, where a user might not be aware of a colleague’s sickness or holiday leave.
While the calendar feature is shared with Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint can all be seamlessly used within calls and meetings. For larger conference calls this offers the opportunity to present information as clearly and focused as though it were an in-person presentation – despite the attendees being miles away.
Stay safe
Multi-device support is featured, which allows users to safely operate on tablets, phones and laptops. This gives the user an option to work with whatever their preferred device is, but they are safe in the knowledge that they are doing so securely. Microsoft’s security credentials are excellent and cannot be matched, never mind beaten, by many. Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is a requirement and will ensure that cyber criminals will not be able to breach your devices and compromise your business’ corporate network.
Neuways’ VoIP experts will be on hand to deal with any tricky implementation issues that you encounter, as well as providing ongoing support for your company to make the transition to Microsoft 365 Business Voice as seamless as possible.
And those are just the start of the benefits Microsoft 365 Business Voice can bring to your business – get in touch with the VoIP experts at Neuways today for a FREE demo of Business Voice.
