Hosted IP Voice

Overview

Traditional voice systems can be inflexible and expensive, and administering your users, phone lines and call routing is time-consuming. That’s where Hosted IP Voice comes in, providing you with a unified telephony estate, so you don’t have to manage complex equipment.

Instead of designing your business around the limitations of your infrastructure, Hosted IP Voice flexes with the requirements of your organisation. The service gives you all the features and functionality you need to work effectively, with the freedom to add and remove licenses as your needs change.

Workers on the road or at home can use the same number wherever they are and it’s simple to manage the service yourself from any location. It’s also possible to set up additional branches without worrying about sourcing new systems and making them interoperate.

Take a look at the business benefits or give us a call on 0800 027 0011 to discuss how it could work for your business.

Benefits

Some of the benefits of choosing Hosted IP Voice:

• No need to invest in new hardware

  Hosted IP Voice replaces your legacy PBX with a unified telephony infrastructure hosted in the cloud.

• Increase your mobility

  Access and configure your Hosted IP Voice 
installation from any computer with a network connection.

• Cut costs

  Minimal capital expenditure and manageable monthly hosting fees. Cut cost of supporting and maintaining on-premise equipment and 
make free calls between connected sites

• Pay for what you use

  Bolt on additional capacity and new features as 
required

• True business agility

  Let your workers move location while keeping the same number

• Ensure business continuity

  Your business can carry on functioning with our built-in disaster recovery routing.

• Easy-to-use

  Our configuration tools and centralised reporting make it simple to 
manage your service

View the technical features of this product or take a look at our FAQs.

Technical features

• Vodafone Service Portal

  Hosted IP Voice uses a comprehensive Web-based Admin Portal that gives administrators total control over system functionalities. This enables them to allocate each user a login and user profile providing access to whichever services and functions the administrator decides is appropriate.

• Call recording

  Whether your business needs to comply with regulations, follow in-house quality assurance, or train its staff, Call Recording stores your calls and lets you manage them in a structured, organised fashion. The Vodafone Service Portal provides access to all recordings. You can download or stream to a PC, organise into folders, annotate and rate for various uses, and rename or delete as required.

• Listen in and break in

  Listen in to calls live, for training, management and regulatory purposes. Intervene and take over calls when necessary.

• Voicemail management

  Vodafone Hosted IP Voice lets your staff access their personal voicemail messages at any time by dialling a dedicated extension. Alternatively they can access voice messages from a voicemail ‘inbox’ via their own Personal Portal, which lets them stream, download and organise their messages. Voicemails can also be forwarded to any mobile phone or automatically emailed as .wav files, so your agents need never miss a message.

• IVR

  Interactive Voice Response establishes a logical and easy-to-use front-end menu system that enables the individual customer to make the right selections, and be effectively routed either to pre-recorded information or the most appropriate person to take the call.

• Intelligent call forwarding

  This lets your administrators configure Call Forwarding Rules, where one or more actions are attempted by the system in succession under certain conditions. The Call Forwarding Groups feature means rules can forward calls to multiple destinations, whereas Break Out from Voicemail lets the caller switch from voicemail to another number, group or service.

• Personal conferencing

  Using a dedicated access number, users can engage in an audio conference, which can be recorded in its entirety.

• Service builder

  The service builder is a powerful automated call flow management tool that uses an intuitive drag-and-drop interface. This allows you to create individual call routing patterns and also helps you develop more complicated IVR menus as necessary.

• Whisper prompting

  Whisper prompting provides the B-party with a short audio prompt prior to connecting the caller. Use this, for example, to confirm the caller’s location, number dialled or service selected.

• Screen-based switchboard

  The Hosted IP Voice Switchboard allows various functions of the system to be controlled using a versatile drag and drop operator console, acting as a virtual ’switchboard on a screen’. Callers can request assistance and be transferred among different user extensions, hunt groups or conferences.

• Twinning

  Twinning allows you to pair an external number with your internal Hosted IP Voice phone so that if you are away from your desk you can pick up calls on your mobile or other phone.

• Pull to ground

  Pull to ground also allows calls forwarded to another number to be sent back to the user’s Hosted IP Voice phone.

• Hunt groups

  Hunt groups are used in an office situation where there are several phones in a location, and the caller needs to get through to any of these. There are three kinds of hunt groups: Parallel (phones ring at once), Terminal (phones ring in sequence), and Cyclic (phones ring in sequence, always trying the longest waiting user first).

• Soft Client iPath Softphone

  The iPathTM softphone gives you full computer telephony integration (CTI). Initiate, transfer and manage calls from your desktop. The soft client can be ‘paired’ with an IP phone, i.e. controls on either will work in tandem.

• Personal Portal

  Each individual employee is able to easily control the routing of their incoming calls via the Personal Portal.

• Handsets

  We provide a range of iPath handsets which are fully integrated with Hosted IP Voice and the iPath soft client.

Got questions? Take a look at our FAQs or give us a call on 0800 027 0011 and we would be happy to answer them.

FAQs

If you have any questions about this product which are not answered below please give us a call on 0800 027 0011 and we'd be delighted to help.

I currently have a disparate PBX estate and some of my equipment is still fit for purpose. Would I have to throw it all out if I use Hosted IP Voice?

You can deploy Hosted IP Voice to replace any end-of-life system, while retaining platforms which are still fit-for-purpose and using SIP Trunking to bring them into a single manageable framework alongside newly-deployed Hosted IP Voice sites and home-workers.

Is it possible for off-site workers to use the same number as when they are on-site?

Hosted IP Voice allows workers to use the same number wherever they are – at home, on the road or hot-desking.

How can I realise hard cost benefits by consolidating my telephony estate?

Hosted IP Voice can be deployed with minimal capex and eliminates almost all annuity hardware maintenance costs. Efficiency gains due to centralised management provide additional ‘soft’ cost savings which further strengthen the business case.

Will new costs be incurred due to software upgrades?

As upgrades go live on our central platform, they do not cause disruption to your business. Unlike a premise-based platform, new software versions do not require large unexpected CAPEX investments to be rolled out across your whole estate.

Can I dispose of separate line rentals and cut down on internal call costs?

Hosted IP Voice allows you to transfer calls between sites without taking up multiple PBX lines, and gives you free calls between sites.