To define it simply, VoIP is the transmission of the telephone call over the internet instead of dedicated copper telephone lines. This conversion from analog to digital opened the way to overlay many additional features and services on top of the traditional phone call. All these extra services bundled together are known as UCaaS, or many different communication technologies or channels coming together under one umbrella. This article treats VoIP and UCaaS interchangeably.

Most people don’t think twice about a phone call. The phone rings, it’s answered, and a conversation is started and finished. There is so much more that could be captured in that simple transaction. You may be saying, “I got everything I needed from the phone call; I don’t need anything else from it.” If that’s you, then as Bill Nye has famously said, “Consider the following.”

If you run a call-heavy business, call metrics can be important. Do you know how long the average wait time is? Can you monitor which employees are signed into call queues? Can your staff see who is already on a call before trying to transfer a call? Is your call routing set up so your customer connects with the staff member who can best help them?

VoIP platforms are powerful, and the best ones unify your communication channels. They add the options of reporting, recording, routing, and integration.

Managers can listen in on calls for training—and if a call starts to get tough, they can “whisper” advice to the employee or take over the call completely. Add some computer-generated sentiment analysis, and if a call is deemed negative, then managers can review the interaction, giving customer management a proactive workflow.

Calls, texts, files, and video calls can all be recorded to avoid the dreaded “he said/she said” arguments.

Integrations with third-party services are often part of VoIP systems. Connections with customer success management/customer relationship management (CSM/CRM) suites, electronic health records, or any customer management tool with an open Application Programming Interface allows for customer records to pop open before your staff answers the phones. These services can capture call details to prevent duplicate work. Outbound automations can also send mass texts for marketing purposes or for appointment reminders.

Is your staff on the go? VoIP can let them start a call on a computer and then flip to a cell phone to continue the call while running to the next meeting. Remote work is also a breeze since this service can work from anywhere with an internet connection. Remote workers can be located anywhere and make and receive calls from local numbers. If you’re opening a new office out of state, local numbers for that new location are added to the account and assigned to the staff working there. No need to source local phone service and add an additional bill.

Finally, customers (especially younger generations) expect to be able to contact a business without picking up the phone. If your business isn’t set up to receive text messages or have a website that can handle chat requests, you are losing customers.

Employees come and employees go. With their departure goes any communication history they had with your customers and other staff members—unless it was manually captured elsewhere, say, within a CRM database. With UCaaS platforms, a reassigned phone number can keep all the historical communications intact, available for the employee taking over that position. Archiving features are also available, so any and all communications (texts, calls, chats, shared files, et cetera) can be automatically captured and stored for years, protecting against deletion.

Most VoIP providers have a cell phone app available, so your employees can use their own mobile phones (no more carrying around multiple devices) while keeping business communications separate from personal. The app handles all texts and calls that come through the business line. Employees no longer need to share a personal cell number if a client likes to text.

These features can maintain interactions so that knowledge isn’t lost when an employee leaves. Files and folders on computer systems are backed up; your communications data should be too.

Data fidelity refers to the accuracy and completeness of data. Many industries—law, healthcare, finance, government—have minimum standards to meet or exceed for protecting the data they collect and being able to reproduce that information in a complete and accurate state.

VoIP systems can capture more than simple call recording. As previously discussed, built-in archiving can capture everything: text messages, intraoffice chats, shared files, recorded calls, and video meetings. Archival storage is often immutable storage, meaning the data can’t be deleted until a certain number of years has passed—whatever your industry’s compliance requirements mandate. This ensures that you can recall more than just email communications if a litigation event or information request come up, giving a more complete picture.

With UCaaS doing so much more than just making and taking calls, data encryption is also built into these platforms; many services offer encryption and security levels that meet or exceed Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, Customer Proprietary Network Information, and General Data Protection Regulation standards, among others, keeping data protected and your business compliant.

The ubiquity of broadband internet has made the rapid advancement of cloud-based technologies a reality. VoIP platforms are no exception. Gone are the days when you needed to purchase expensive phone servers, which needed maintenance and replacement every few years, to house in your office. Cloud-based VoIP and UCaaS platforms are easy to deploy, scale, and afford.

Being fully digital, VoIP systems are easy to set up and maintain. Web portals exist that allow for the configuration of user accounts, phone numbers, extensions, call routing, and the management of other features included in your service. Another benefit is that these services easily scale from 1 to 1,000 users. If you’re a brand-new solo-preneur opening an office, downsizing, or need call center capabilities, the number of active lines on your account can increase or decrease easily and be provisioned in a matter of minutes.

With less equipment to buy, there is obviously less cost to adopt a new VoIP service. Since many services offer apps for computers and cell phones, traditional desk handsets aren’t even needed. For many businesses, the reality is that switching to VoIP has a zero-dollar adoption cost. However, these services are so flexible that if a few physical phones are needed, they are bought, assigned to a person, and auto-configure once connected to the internet.

With so many features bundled with a simple phone call, your business can excel at keeping communication consistent and of high quality with your customers and clients. Calls can be controlled to reduce fatigue on frontline workers, and managers can gather the metrics needed to make changes to staffing or how many people are signed into any given call queue. Your business can capture and store data to aid in compliance and protections, and the flexibility and lower costs gives you an easy-to-use tool to keep your business agile to changing needs.