The world is changing. Businesses are moving from a workforce that is chained to a desk for eight hours a day, five days a week to a more flexible employment model. This flexibility means that much of a company’s workforce may be spread throughout a city or even throughout the planet at any given time. Although this has been shown to improve employee productivity, certain tasks are more efficient when accomplished face to face.

This phenomenon has caused videoconferencing to go from nice to have to essential in businesses of all sizes.

To meet the needs of a dispersed workforce, Yealink has developed one of the most flexible, cost-effective and feature-rich set of solutions on the market. This article reviews Yealink’s videoconferencing systems, including its innovative cloud-based VCMS platform.

The U.S. mobile worker population will grow steadily to 105.4 million in 2020, according to a forecast from International Data Corporation (IDC). By the end of the forecast period, IDC expects mobile workers to account for 72% of the total U.S. workforce.

If your communications infrastructure is not set up to handle the needs of mobile workers, your business could be missing out on gains in productivity and employee loyalty. Since adequately equipped mobile workers can do their job anywhere, they can perform on the go without having to wait until they get back to their desk to implement certain tasks. A study conducted by Staples found that 76% of telecommuters are more willing to put in extra time on work and report being more loyal to their company since telecommuting.

Here are six ways that you can leverage your VoIP telephony system to enable workforce mobility.

Product Review

Yealink’s W41P IP DECT phone solution brings a new level of flexibility to cordless phones in the workplace. The W41P package includes a W60B DECT base station, a T41S IP desk phone, and a DD10K DECT USB dongle that allows the IP phone to double as a DECT handset, so you get all the rich features and functionalities of VoIP combined with the convenience and mobility of DECT.

Product Review

Sangoma offers an ideal solution for the mobile employee in its new DC201 DECT Base + Handset system. This is a package that includes a DB20 DECT base station with a single D10 handset. The DC201 is an ideal starting point for establishing an internal wireless telephony system which you can later expand by adding additional handsets, as well as additional base stations to expand the coverage area.

Product review

In many workspaces, internal mobility is vital.  This is especially true of businesses that have extensive facilities such as warehouses, factories, hotels, schools, or even university campuses where employees are required to physically move from place to place to get their jobs done. In these kinds of enterprises,  professionals must be reachable no matter where they are on campus.

Grandstream’s DP750 DECT VoIP base station enables this type of mobile connectivity by combining two reliable technologies: DECT and VoIP. This base station delivers wireless coverage of up to 300 meters outdoors and 50 meters indoors for up to five DP720 DECT handsets, allowing five concurrent calls while supporting up to ten SIP accounts.

For organizations that need to cover an even greater surface area, Grandstream has launched the DP760 long-range wideband DECT repeater for extending the coverage area of the DP750 base station.

A decade ago, it would have been rare to meet someone who could carry out their profession from anywhere. For most, “going to work” involved physically going to a place of business. Today, because of the swift development of collaboration tools and the ubiquitousness of connectivity to the internet, working from anywhere is not only an option, but is often preferred by both employer and employee. Studies have shown that a mobile workforce tends to be more productive and experience higher job satisfaction.

Voice over IP (VoIP) technology is one of the major facilitators of employee mobility. Here we highlight some of the functionalities and tools that allow for a seamlessly mobile workforce.

Case Study: long-range wireless coverage & durable handsets for stables & kennels

Even in this digital age, your business can’t afford to ignore voicemail

There’s a lot of talk out there about the obsolescence of voicemail. But companies that don’t give importance to voicemail do so to the detriment of their customers' experience.

CRM.com reported that small- and mid-sized businesses experience up to 75% voicemail abandonment, referring to the people that call the company but hang up without leaving a message when transferred to voicemail.

This startling statistic is in part fueled by a lack of responsiveness on the part of the voicemail recipient. According to Nuance, 27% of those surveyed reported that when they get a voicemail, they feel burdened by the process of retrieving and listening to it, and 19% said they actually get annoyed when they receive a voicemail!

Luckily, it’s possible to have the best of both worlds and reap the benefits of voicemail while removing the hassle for company associates.

Ignore them at your own risk!

As we gear up for Channel Partners Evolution later this month in Austin, we’ve been thinking about the incredible pace at which digitization is taking over every aspect of business and the importance of a nimble enterprise structure that can continually adapt to this progress.

It can seem overwhelming keeping up with it all, so we’ve boiled it down to five trends that will define the evolution of VoIP over the next decade. Ignore them at your own risk!

When to use VoLTE vs. an OTT voice app

In a previous article, we discussed voice over LTE (VoLTE) and its implications for the enterprise VoIP phone system. All voice traffic over the LTE (also known as 4G mobile) network is packetized and conforms to modern VoIP standards, making it the first mobile telephony standard to completely circumvent the traditional circuit-switched telephony infrastructure.

In many ways, VoLTE sounds a lot like over-the-top (OTT) voice applications that leverage the same protocols for voice. In this article, we look at what OTT voice apps are, what VoLTE is in relation to OTT, and the benefits of using one, the other or both over an LTE network.