U.S. Economic Slowdown and VoIP

As talk of the U.S. economic slowdown and Fiscal Cliff rolls off the tongues of Wall Street executives and news personnel, many people are wondering how skyrocketing taxes will affect small businesses.

Fortunately for the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) industry, they stand to fare better during this dismal recession than other technology-related companies. In fact, some industry experts claim this might be a catalyst for the VoIP industry.

While businesses across all sectors are trying to decrease overhead costs and cut budgets, VoIP actually serves as a cost-cutting vessel for businesses. In fact, business VoIP stands to save industries thousands of dollars annually, helping small businesses, medium-sized businesses and corporations alike.

Our culture has evolved to rely heavily on communication. Just because our nation is suffering from an economic recession does not mean that businesses will communicate less. In fact, it means that marketing departments need to work even more. In a day and age where email and text communication has become prevalent in business environments, many businesses are reincorporating time-honored customer satisfaction techniques, such as the ability to speak to a live representative.

Many businesses utilize VoIP for not only public consumer communication channels, but also for internal communications. VoIP business services helps consolidate business communications into one central channel, helping merge Internet communications with advanced telephony services, such as voicemail, call forwarding, auto attendant features, direct department forwarding, video conferencing and much more.

While traditionally most companies were required to purchase expensive hardware and software to properly run a VoIP hosted telephone system, with the advent of hosted PBX and cloud-based software, this costly initial investment is no longer required. In today’s advanced VoIP business world, customers can have telecommunication companies, such as Jive, support their services offsite in a secure, remote “cloud-like” location. Cloud technology is easily accessed by employees anywhere or at anytime, making it extremely convenient and cost effective.

Additionally, today’s business VoIP systems have helped many companies take their marketing plans and strategies to the next level – internationally. VoIP ensures that international and long distance telephone calls no longer break the bank, which is an exceptional feature when a company is expanding or is a web-based business with clients around the world.

Many experts predict that as the U.S. dollar decreases in value, many American companies will find much of their business is overseas. This geographic shift will completely redefine American business prospects.