Can You Really Save Thousands of Dollars Ugrading Your Voicemail?

If time is money, you can make the case that the growing sophistication and diversity of voicemail applications certainly will make money for businesses by saving time on administrative tasks needed to route and store messages.
IP telephony solutions are giving people a fast and efficient way to obtain and manage voice mails from their web browser. The auto-attendant and automatic-callback capabilities of today’s voicemail keeps time-sensitive business leads and other communications from falling through the cracks, too. That’s especially important for companies that can’t spend big money on elaborate call management systems and the IT support personnel that come with them. Now voicemail lets you act on messages practically in real-time, instead of a delayed-reaction response that could mean lost business opportunities—it definitely saves money.
State-of-the-art voicemail applications, like our Unified Arts centralized Unified Messaging platform, are perfect examples of ways this kind of cost-effectiveness can improve the bottom line. The customized version of the platform we built for the State of Georgia was a single-site, pay-as-you-go system with a flexible interface to ILEC (Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier) carriers throughout the state. It replaced the dozens of widely-scattered voicemail systems the previous vendor had employed and has saved the State about $2 million each year.
The System also made it easier for call recipients in the field to act quickly on calls because it forwards voicemails to their e-mail accounts. And, because it was build-to-suit rather than off-the-shelf, the system specifically targeted the State’s telephony needs.
Speeding up call response by expanding call-response options is something road warriors need to transact business on the go. Integrating voice- and e-mail messaging does that for them—all in a technology framework they already understand. New voicemail technologies give individual system users administrative control of their communication tools to make their work flow more productive. These call control capabilities are available to remote and on-site workers alike. A process—like routing the voice message to e-mail, then from e-mail via RSS feed to a Google page becomes easy and indispensably useful.
Accessible VoIP platforms utilizing easy to write and scale programming languages allow the creation of flexible and inexpensive voicemail apps.  Now CTO’s can deploy voice-enhanced business process innovations at a rapid clip – things like visual voicemail, voicemail-to-email routing with priority stacking instructions, broad-based copy routing and narrowcasting.
New innovations in VoIP accessibility make voicemail communications – and the communicators who send and receive them – more mobile in the pursuit of business. As voice gets integrated into the business process, voicemail becomes streamlined and more readily accessible in a greater variety of ways – all of which creates enormous economies of scale. New open-source compatibility gives app developers access to a whole new universe of simple, affordable software tools. There’s no longer the need to pay the big IP networking solutions companies for oversized product offerings.
Like other IP telephony functions, voicemail no longer has to live on-premise. Because the operating platform can exist in the cloud, businesses can avoid paying the capital expenditures necessary for keeping their own systems. The inherent flexibility of voice services in the cloud gives businesses the power to immediately adapt their voicemail requirements by scaling up or down to fit changing corporate realities.
VoIP’s emergence, and its convergence with IP telephony, gives carriers a low-cost opportunity to extend their levels of scalability to corporate voicemail functions (which lowers the cost to the corporation, too). Now, carriers can remotely administer centralized, shared servers for their enterprise customers, as well as offer unified voicemail services that are accessible through a growing variety of mobile- and desktop-based devices.
Hosted IP voicemail has evolved so that businesses can expect low-cost service dependability as a matter of course. Even the largest businesses can save money by choosing a hosted, cloud approach over on-premises systems. The latter are more expensive because corporations have to dedicate resources, upkeep and tech support to cover a fairly limited user base. Sharing the voicemail environment with a bigger subscriber base drawn from multiple companies lowers the cost per user, so businesses can offer more employees advanced voicemail services.  Yet another open standards benefit occurs too—IP-based voicemail can go beyond the provider to anywhere on the Internet – far surpassing proprietary systems that confine voicemail to people within an internal network.
Businesses can manage and integrate inbound messaging easier and for less money. They can mash-up and customize more services including e-mail, fax, real-time voice and paging – thanks to the IP network’s global interconnectivity. The inbound content these services generate requires a unified in-box. This in-box can simplify communications by managing all of them – without the need of extra phone lines or fax machines.