VoIP phone service

There are many small business VoIP providers out there out there. How can you choose the right one? If you text and do video meetings as well, then you might need a unified communications platform.

What is a VoIP phone service?

If you’re up to speed with the terminology, feel free to skip ahead. If you need VoIP 101, keep reading.

VoIP stands for Voice over Internet Protocol. It’s the technology that lets you make and receive phone calls over the Internet instead of a traditional phone network.

VoIP phone services are offered by dedicated hosted VoIP providers or unified communications platforms like Dialpad. In the latter case, VoIP services are built in as a part of a cloud-based unified communications (UCaaS) platform, which you can use to manage all your phone calls and other communications centrally on different devices. As well as being significantly cheaper than landlines, VoIP lets you connect from anywhere via mobile devices or desktops with a high-speed Internet connection.

Voice over IP also gives you advanced features that aren’t always possible with a standard telephone service—such as call recording, caller ID, real-time transcriptions, easily customizable voicemail greetings, and more.

How does a VoIP phone service work?

VoIP is a broad term for telephony technologies that enable voice calls over the Internet instead of using regular phone lines.

Think of your voice as an analog signal. VoIP converts this into a digital format (called a “packet”) that can be transmitted over an IP network. An IP or Internet protocol address is what computers use to communicate with one another on the Internet.

Once the call is connected, VoIP converts the packets back into analog signals so they can be received by the phone of the person you’ve called (if you want to get technical, the analog signals are encoded and decoded using software called a codec).

With Dialpad, you get more than just a VoIP phone service for business

The benefits of a good cloud VoIP phone service

Quick and easy deployment

Once you decide to switch to VoIP, you need to get up and running with minimum disruption. So, choose something that makes it easy to do things like add and remove users, and add new phone numbers. Make sure your provider has robust support and training materials (like Dialpad's detailed online Help Center) to help everyone onboard quickly.

Number porting: Use your existing number

If you don’t want to make your clients and customers remember a new phone number, why not bring your existing phone numbers from your current enterprise or small business phone system provider to your new communications platform?

With Dialpad, you can port existing numbers, VoIP numbers, and toll-free numbers to your new cloud VoIP platform with no interruption in service—and it’s free to port local phone numbers in the US.

Contact center functionality, fully integrated

Chances are, your business needs to communicate effectively both internally and with customers. So, why would you want your contact center and customer support comms separate to your internal communication channels?

Dialpad's AI-powered customer engagement platform is fully integrated with your other channels and enterprise VoIP services. That means your agents, supervisors, and anyone else besides can use all the cutting-edge cloud contact center features and drop a quick message to a colleague or start a team video call, all from the same platform.