Landline Phones are On the Way Out, What’s Next?

Take a good, hard look at your desk telephone. How often do you use it for day-to-day operations? With the advent of technologies like Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and the smartphone, it seems silly to be reliant on the telephone that’s tethered to your desk. However, some people still aren’t ready to leave the office telephone behind in favor of these new technologies. But… why?

Perhaps it’s the idea of keeping the home environment and the workplace separate (which makes sense), or maybe it’s because office phones are actually used more often than we might give them credit for. A survey from RingCentral, which was performed in May 2015, studied the ways in which 505 United States workers communicate within the office. The results were somewhat surprising: 65 percent of the workers would rather use their office phone to conduct business, while only 30 percent claimed that they preferred to use mobile devices for calls.

When you consider how often you see workers on their smartphones, this number might feel almost unbelievable. It seems that workers are always calling someone, sending text messages, or responding to inquiries with their mobile devices. With the millennial generation becoming a prominent part of today’s workforce, it’s suspected by Curtis Peterson, the senior vice president of RingCentral, that it’s primarily the younger generation that’s not comfortable working with the office telephone. In fact, according to another survey from TollFreeForwarding.com, only 6.5 percent of people between the ages of 25 and 34 are comfortable using a telephone, and would rather resort to other methods of communication, like messaging or email.

Either way, the telephone isn’t going anywhere, even if it is a somewhat archaic solution in the face of new technologies like VoIP. Thus, it’s important to embrace the necessity of voice communication, even if it isn’t with the traditional telephone solution that we’re all so used to using. You might find that many communications solutions, including instant messaging, email, and VoIP, are all necessities in a modern office filled with a diverse workforce.

It’s been proven that the office telephone is a great place to start cutting unnecessary costs out of your business’s operational budget. More often than not, big cable companies are known to package together services that aren’t necessarily useful for your organization. Add the fact that it’s difficult at best to make changes to your telephony infrastructure on a whim, and you have yourself a massive inconvenience that could be costing your organization in the long run.

This is why it’s much more efficient to integrate a VoIP phone system that’s designed specifically for use by your business. With VoIP, you avoid all of the costly extra features that come along with your typical phone solution. You can add new features to your VoIP solution as you see fit, and with VoIP, you won’t be blindsided by unexpected costs every month. This provides the scalable solution that a small business needs in order to effectively manage its communications strategy.

If your business is ready to get a real communications solution, look no further than Macro Systems’s VoIP solution. We keep the “phony” out of “telephony” solutions. To learn more, give us a call at (703) 359-9211.