The Ultimate Guide to Enterprise Telephony in UcaaS

The market for UCaaS is skyrocketing. Globally, it was valued at $25.85 billion in 2020. It’s now expected to reach nearly $70 billion by 2028. Part of this rapid growth comes down to who is adopting UCaaS today – it’s not just small to medium-sized businesses. With the ability to switch from an on-premises telephony system to the cloud, at scale and without interrupting business operations, large enterprises are also adopting UCaaS to benefit from cloud-based enterprise telephony.

But enterprise telephony is different from the telephony capabilities included in unified communications systems designed for SMBs. If you’re looking for a platform for your company, you need to know exactly what you get from an enterprise solution.

In this guide, we’re unpacking the benefits of unified communications for enterprise organizations and exploring the depth enterprise telephony provides.

What Is Enterprise Telephony?

Telephony refers to the technology your business uses to communicate across long distances. It includes phone calls, fax, text messaging, and video conferencing.

This field of business communications has evolved rapidly over the past three decades. Since the 1940s, businesses have relied on a public switched telephone network (PSTN) to make and receive long-distance calls and faxes. With this type of technology, sounds are transmitted via analog phone lines to a switch at the phone company’s central office, and then on to the receiver’s phone.

With the introduction of voice over internet protocol (VoIP) technology in the late ’90s, early adopters started using internet telephony. With VoIP technology, voice data transmits over the internet. This allows companies to save on hardware costs and long-distance communications.

Today, enterprise telephony provides all the essential features enterprise businesses have come to rely on – call forwarding, call hold, three-way-calling, voicemail, and call transfer. But with UCaaS, you get all the benefits of internet telephony plus the advantages of a unified system that’s capable of integrating your call, text, and fax functions with your main business and collaboration applications.

What Does Enterprise Internet-Based Telephony Offer?

With enterprise telephony, you get more powerful technology, better security, and easier scaling.

While the details depend on your provider, here are some of the capabilities you can expect with enterprise telephony in UCaaS:

• The ability to transfer files, share screens, email, and chat from one interface – and the power to complete all of these actions at once
• Easy customization for your interactive voice response (IVR) technology, call waiting, and hold features
• Built-in business continuity features, including file backup and real-time file syncing
• Email system with compliance-friendly features for HIPPA, GDPR, and other regulations, such as high-level email encryption and protection
• Integration with your contact center as a service (CCaaS) platform and in-depth analytics and functions to ensure service quality, such as call history, a quality of service dashboard, and monitoring, whisper, and barge functions for supervisors

The Benefits of UCaaS at the Enterprise Level

With internet-based telephony, you no longer have the barriers of an analog system that depends on telephone wires. All of your communication and collaboration functionality relies on the internet, not telephone companies. This means, even with hundreds or thousands of employees, teams can be just as connected as they would be if they were in the same location.

So why not just use enterprise VoIP?

To compete in today’s business landscape, most businesses need more than just VoIP. Unified communications gives you all the power and security of enterprise telephony – the ability to call, fax, chat, and share files with hundreds of employees – all in one system.

Employees and other stakeholders across the country or across the globe can participate in video meetings, conference calls, sales presentations, and training webinars and count on the same call and video quality.

Modern UCaaS digitizes faxes, so you can send files almost instantaneously and never worry about keeping track of physical paperwork.

And, your communications systems and data can work with other enterprise systems, such as Salesforce, NetSuite, MS Dynamics, Sugar CRM, and more. When you integrate with your CCaaS, CRM, or other apps, data is updated in real-time across your entire system. This gives your teams up-to-date analytical insights and the power to make better-informed business decisions.

Cloud-based unified communications enables even large enterprises to operate with fully remote or hybrid teams. With enterprise UCaaS and the sophisticated telephony that’s built into it, the need to house hundreds of employees in the office is gone.

This opens up new possibilities for enterprise organizations – the ability to scale back on real estate costs yet scale up on manpower.

Your company can also hire from a wider talent pool because staff can connect to your entire business system from anywhere. And, it makes you a more attractive employer – according to a recent survey of 7,250 employees in 12 countries, 45 percent said that if they were to change jobs, they would only take on a new position at a company that offers flexible and remote work options.

The bottom line is, without enterprise telephony and UCaaS, competing on all fronts is going to become increasingly difficult.

Enterprise Telephony in UCaaS Lets Today’s Companies Take on the Future

UCaaS gives you the tools to take your business communications and collaboration to the next level. This is true whether you’re running an SMB or are at the enterprise level.

Enterprise telephony capabilities enable ultra-streamlined communications at scale. You get a no-limits approach to business communications and all the features, integration power, and security required at the enterprise level.

Intermedia Unite Enterprise is a comprehensive UCaaS solution that lets you hold HD-quality video and call conferences with 200 participants, offers full integration with popular business apps such as Salesforce and Microsoft Teams, and provides all the features of its advanced unified communications platform. Learn more about what Intermedia Unite can do for your business.