Have you been looking to find out more about SIP trunking and the benefits these could provide for your users? While the benefits of SIP trunking may not always be immediately clear, there are countless reasons you might want to invest in SIP trunks for your business’s call centre. And with this in mind today, we’re looking at what SIP trunks are and the ten key things every business should know about integrating SIP trunks and VoIP systems for their communication success.
What is SIP Trunking?
What is SIP trunking? Well, while we won’t go into the major technicalities behind SIP trunks in today’s system, we should first explain those SIP trunks are a unique type of “protocol” often implemented for business VoIP systems. Through the SIP trunk, caller devices are used to decode data derived from voice signals, which in turn provides a reliable, secure link between your PBX and the generic phone line.
Notably, this connection is established through an Internet connection, making SIP trunking highly effective for systems receiving significant call volumes of outbound and inbound calls. However, not every SIP system is necessarily created equally, which may be worth considering as part of your final decision.
10 Things Every Business Should Know About SIP Trunks
At this point, we’ve given a brief summary of what SIP trunks are – but not every SIP system is equal. What’s more, for businesses just getting started with SIP, it can be a little hard to wrap your head around how they work – which is why the following ten points give a basis from which to determine the most suitable system for your needs.
#1 SIP Trunking is A Great Way to Enhance Communication Resilience
We’d be remiss to start this list with anything other than praising the resilience of SIP trunking as a system. Indeed, in cases of disruption, the business can switch off affected trunks, allowing the remaining SIP trunks to continue operating efficiently – enhancing customer service and increasing the chances of your customers enjoying a top-class experience.
#2 SIP Trunking can Offer Excellent Cost-Saving Potential
We’re all looking for ways to increase our business’s profitability – and SIP trunking is a great option in this regard. While the exact cost savings usually vary from firm to firm, it’s relatively common to save anywhere up to 40% on your voice budget through SIP trunking, making it highly valuable overall.
#3 SIP Trunking can Integrate with the Cloud
Many businesses are implementing cloud technologies – and, through SIP trunking, you can also optimize your call centre through cloud management. As such, more and more businesses are now implementing SIP trunks alongside unified communications and PBX services through the cloud, thanks to their ability to link with Cloud data centres.
#4 It Improves Audio Quality
Your business’s customers deserve top-quality, professional results from your firm. However, there are few things more offputting to a customer to reach out to the call centre, only to be met with a poor quality line. Fortunately, SIP trunks often deliver far higher audio quality, which helps enhance your customer experience drastically (hopefully leading to more sales or a more significant number of resolutions).
#5 Is a Self-Service Portal Offered?
Another significant factor you should know about SIP trunks is that many come with a self-service portal – but not every single one. Self-service portals allow your business’s IT, team, to oversee your network’s functionality and ensure things are running smoothly – and, as a result, it’s an important fact to consider when deciding on the right supplier.
Is a self-service portal offered, or if not, can you count on a top-class quality of service to oversee the system? This question could massively influence your overall experience with the SIP service portal, so it is well worth considering.
#6 SIP Trunking is Easy to Update for Seasonal Demands
Many businesses – especially those operating in eCommerce, rely on highly seasonal business models. Naturally, at times of high demand, customers can rely on your business’s communication channels far more, placing them under significantly heightened stress. But, if you only need the extra capacity for a short time each year, the cost-efficacy of investing in a new system may not offer great value.
Fortunately, SIP trunks help overcome this, providing easy scalability – allowing you to customise your infrastructure easily based on the anticipated numbers of channels needed. And, if you find you actually need more at the time, that’s fine too; they’re very rapid and simple to update!
#7 You Can Incorporate Numerous SIP Channels for Easy Management
One of the most pivotal features of SIP trunks is their ability to work across multiple channels simultaneously. Businesses with larger-scale needs may need to implement more SIP channels to ensure smooth, reliable services – so, if you’re unsure about how many your business might need, it’s worth keeping this in mind and discussing it with your provider.
As a typical rule of thumb, most businesses find that one SIP channel for every three employees is usually suitable, although your business model may significantly influence this. For example, if you handle hundreds of incoming calls into the call centre, you may need substantially more since each channel can only run one call at a time.
#8 You Can Customise your SIP Trunk with Add-ons
Every business has unique requirements. But did you know that you can customise your SIP trunks through add-ons? Add-ons such as business text messaging can potentially be valuable based on how you manage your customers and communications. As such, this may be worth discussing with your VoIP systems provider.
#9 You Can Use SIP Trunks for Conference Calling
One feature of SIP trunking that many businesses overlook initially is the ability of SIP trunks to enable media sharing. This feature allows businesses to optimise their communication strategies, implementing conference calling and the like to deliver superior training or wide-scale support for stakeholders in the business. This feature also cuts the business’s reliance on traditional conference calling platforms such as Zoom, which can be notoriously unreliable in many cases.
#10 Not Every SIP Trunking Provider is Equal
Unfortunately, we need to end this list with a warning: not every SIP trunking provider is equal. As such, when looking to get a SIP trunk installed for your business’s VoIP systems, we highly recommend doing your research to determine the quality of service a provider can offer. There may be numerous factors influencing this, such as the voice quality, cost, reliability, coverage, and so on. In short: you want to choose a SIP trunking provider you can count on for effective results.
Thinking of Installing a VoIP System? Contact Gulaga Networks Today
If you’ve been planning on investing in SIP trunks or VoIP systems, it’s the first integral that you’ve partnered with a professional provider of top-quality services. Indeed, while SIP trunking can offer many benefits, it’s often only as good as the team installing it – which may substantially influence your overall decision.
Fortunately, this shouldn’t have to be a major challenge; luckily, our SIP trunking experts here at Gulaga Networks can help. So, if you have any further questions about how SIP trunks work or any of the points we’ve raised on today’s list, please don’t hesitate to give us a shout and see how we can help.