BT Cloud Voice is a cloud-based phone system, available to businesses across the UK. Cloud Voice marks a major transition from traditional phonelines, entirely utilising the internet in order to make phone calls. This is beneficial for businesses as it provides customers with the flexibility for their business to go and enables remote workforces. By utilising BT’s widespread network across the UK, Cloud Voice can also be integrated with many other BT services, allowing for improved scalability.
How BT Cloud Voice Works
BT Cloud Voice utilises Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), which is for internet-based calling, allowing for clearer, more reliable communications. By integrating Cloud Voice with BT broadband or BTnet leased lines, businesses gain greater reliability and increased flexibility.
Finally, being an internet-based solution, BT Cloud Voice enables businesses to add more users and integrate features without having to update their hardware.
BT Cloud Voice Licence Types
There are three license types for BT Cloud Voice offered to suit a variety of different businesses and their specific needs. The first of these being their Basic plan, which, as per the name suggests, provides basic calling functionalities: including call forwarding, voicemail and caller IDs. This makes it the ideal solution for businesses with simpler call requirements and a more limited budget.
The intermediary license type offered for BT Cloud Voice is Connect. Including all the features of the basic license, the Connect license also includes collaboration tools, such as instant messaging and screen sharing. This makes Connect ideal for businesses that require the ability for greater collaboration than standard phone call systems.
However, for businesses that require advanced features, like video conferencing, meeting recording and file sharing, BT Cloud Voice’s most feature-rich option Collaborate is most preferential. Collaborate is ideal for larger teams and businesses with remote employees that require a large range of collaboration tools to ensure day-to-day practices run smoothly.
It should be noted that each license can easily be upgraded, meaning that business communications do not become hindered by growth in demands. This allows your business communications to easily evolve with your business.
Installation and Setup
BT Cloud Voice is easy to setup, offering either Do-It-Yourself self-installation or professional installation options. Dependent on your business’ IT expertise and resources, the applicability of each solution will vary. For example, businesses with dedicated in-house IT expertise and a smaller head count, self-installed Cloud Voice is ideal. On the other hand, for businesses that wish to take a hands-off approach, BT engineers can be leveraged to handle the installation of Cloud Voice with the professional installation option. BT also provide the relevant hardware, distributing IPs, phones and routers in order get the system up and running, therefore reducing the demands on in-house IT teams.
Managed Service and Support
The support for BT Cloud Voice isn’t limited to the setup process, however. With their fully managed service and support offering, your business is backed with BT’s 24/7 UK-based help desk in order to resolve any issues you experience with your Cloud Voice solution.
To continue the support, BT also handles all updates as part of their managed service, which ensures that your systems remain up to date without your business having to worry about downtime or workloads for your IT team.
To further support your business’ IT team, BT also provides proactive network monitoring for Cloud Voice solutions, assisting with keeping your networked communications protected and safe from breaches.
Additional Features
BT Cloud Voice offers many other features than just calling. With features such as call recording, your business can ensure regulatory compliance standards are being maintained, as well as allowing for call training through easy access to recording files.
The implementation of call analytics provides businesses with performance metric tracking, giving insights into call volume, call duration and many other productivity statistics.
Whilst call analytics can be useful for monitoring employee work; in order to monitor customer relations, BT Cloud Voice also integrates with many different Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions.
Finally, with the integration of Cisco Webex, businesses can not only utilise BT Cloud Voice for phone calls but can also make video conference calls too, streamlining communications across the business.
Remote Working Made Easy
One of the best use cases for the Cisco Webex integrations is with remote workforces, allowing for dispersed video conference calls. However, this isn’t the only way that BT Cloud Voice supports remote working. BT Cloud Voice Mobile Access enables users to make and receive calls via their smartphone. By managing Cloud Voice across multiple devices, it allows greater flexibility for remote and hybrid workforces.
Call Security
For many businesses, moving from traditional phone lines to an internet-based phone systems raises concerns over call security. BT Cloud Voice ensures that communications remain secure by encrypting voice data, obfuscating traffic so that it becomes undecipherable to external sources.
Through BT’s regular updates and proactive monitoring offerings, the system remains updated and protected against growing and changing threats.
Finally, for businesses concerned about regulations, BT Cloud Voice ensures regulatory compliance, such as with GDPR.
Upgrading to BT Cloud Voice
Upgrading to BT Cloud Voice is easy for pre-existing BT customers, enabling the transfer of the phone system and services to BT Cloud Voice without any downtime being experienced.
Pre-existing BT customers can also benefit from cost-effective upgrades through discounts and bundles, which allows for consolidated and simplified billing.
Optimised for BT Broadband and BTnet
For businesses concerned with the performance of their communications, BT Cloud Voice has been optimised for BT broadband and BTnet leased lines, with Quality of Service (QoS) integrations. Quality of Service (QoS) is a set of techniques to manage traffic across a network in order to optimise preferential performance. These optimisations prioritise specific network traffic, critical applications or services and in this case, allows BT Cloud Voice to be prioritised, increasing reliability and maintaining consistent performance of calls.
Powerful Analytics and Reporting
Finally, one of the more advanced features that assists with productivity monitoring is the BT Cloud Voice portal. This portal provides reporting tools, which displays Cloud Voice metrics, live data for team performance and real-time analytics, allowing for businesses to make data-led decisions and changes in strategy to better customer satisfaction.
Getting Started
To get started with BT Cloud Voice, businesses should determine the best license type (Basic, Connect, Collaborate) for their specific use case and their required features. Once selected, BT ensure that the switch over of the phone system is seamless whilst minimising potential disruptions.
