Differences between unified communications and VoIP

What are the differences between unified communications and VoIP, and how can each of them serve your modern office? The short answer is that both of these new, innovative telephony approaches can be a good modernization for an enterprise that wants to upgrade toward cutting-edge telecom systems.

However, these systems are different from each other in some fundamental ways and are better geared towards different kinds of organizations. Here’s how the two stack up.

Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, is part of what has replaced the obsolete landline telephone system.

VoIP tends to focus on internet telephony itself with “softphones” and related systems that can create a call bridge over the internet.

VoIP is based on the idea that the global internet already provides a robust network, so innovators could port voice-over that network instead of bringing it through the traditional fiber-optic lines used for the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). Then, all kinds of rich features came along with new VoIP setups, including new kinds of voicemail handling, new kinds of custom handling for inbound calls, and much more that work to benefit businesses.

VoIP systems can also come with internet-connected handsets featuring digital screens for rich media information about calls. All of this contributes to better business insights, better call handling, and, usually, subsequent improvements in metrics like sales and conversions.

Unified communications is a bit different and broader in scope than VoIP. While unified communications does address internet telephony, it often adds things like resources for video conferencing, screen sharing, voicemail, and SMS assistance.

Specifically, unified communications (UC) offers the opportunity to bridge these types of communications and create new functionality for handling inbound calls and other aspects of enterprise telecom. When a call comes through to your business line, it rings your desk phone at home, in the office, your cloud-based web browser, and your cell phone.

Unified communications offers the capability to digitize a voicemail and send it to email or SMS. A call generated at any time of the day or not might come in over internet telephony, but your UC system may be able to use a speech-to-text engine, a relatively new tool, to create a text message and send it to the correct recipient.

Complex call routing is another critical part of what UC systems can achieve. Simply put, the use of real-time and non-real-time systems creates that new responsiveness. Operations are so smooth that it might seem like calls are getting handled magically, when in reality behind-the-scenes technology is delivering messages in new ways.

Communication methods like Facebook Chat and texting that are typically disjointed from your business phone system become fully integrated. Controlling, managing, and integrating your organization’s voice, video, messaging, and content sharing becomes simple when you employ unified communications.

Think about how your business communicates internally and externally. Unified communications systems can be set up to deliver call functionality that makes a business more responsive to its customer base and creates a better frontline impression. How you collaborate is important to business success; companies that adopt and scale these technologies will often see their offices become more competitive in their given markets.