If your business has multiple offices, or is thinking of expanding to a different location, ensuing continuity across these multiple sites is important.
Whether you have two offices in the same city, or hundreds of offices across the UK, linking them together under one unified umbrella.
How can you Connect Multiple Office Locations Together?
There are a few different technologies that your business can use to unify your offices and locations, these include…
VoIP
VoIP, which stands for Voice Over IP, is a form of telephony communication that uses your businesses broadband and internet connectivity to make and receive calls. Using VoIP, your business can connect multiple office locations together.
As long as each office location has a business broadband connection, you can create a unified telephone system using VoIP.
VPN
A VPN, or Virtual Private Network, provides a secure, end-to-end encrypted connection to your businesses devices. VPNs are usually setup to allow remote access, file sharing and data transfer between offices.
A VPN is particularly helpful if you have one centralised head office, and then multiple satellite offices. Many businesses that utilise this setup, often use a leaded line at their head office to ensure a robust connection.
Leased Lines
As we mentioned above, businesses with centralised office ‘hubs’ often use a leased line to provide their satellite units with access to a server, file storage or centralised data centre.
A leased line provides your business with totally dedicated connectivity, absolutely uncontested by any neighbouring businesses or premises. Leased lines are the fastest and most reliable form of broadband connectivity, and are the perfect solution for large, multi-site offices.
A leased line also provides a fixed-IP address, which helps to create VPNs and better IT infrastructure to satellite offices.
Cloud Technology
Chances are, you’ve heard of cloud technology or cloud computing. In fact, your business most likely already uses some form of cloud technology—whether that’s Office 365, a hosted telephone system or even web storage.
With cloud technology, businesses can consolidate their systems without the need for expensive on-site hardware at each of their office locations.
With reduced rollout costs, solutions such as cloud-based telephone systems provide your business with one single telephone system, keeping all your users together no matter where they’re based.
With multi-site support, cloud telephony helps bring your business under one solution, and provides the best over-the-phone experience to your customers.
Multi-site Telephone Systems
When a potential client calls one of your businesses locations, what happens if the users are busy? Or if the client needs to speak to another location?
Keeping your telephone system under one roof allows you to seamlessly hand calls between users, even if they’re working in different offices or locations. With a multi-site telephone system, your business can implement customisable call flows, group hunting, ring plans and call queues across multiple sites and even home workers.
Why Should You Connect Multiple Offices Locations?
You want your business to operate at maximum efficiency. By linking your sites together using IT, telecoms and other technologies, you can create a seamless environment for your team—allowing them to collaborate as though they’re all in the same room.
1. Continuity
With cloud technologies and multi-site telephone systems, you can ensure continuity across your entire business.
By providing consistency for both customers and employees, you give a feeling of familiarity, and build up trust in your business.
2. Increased Productivity
With multi-location solutions, you can increase your team’s productivity and streamline workflows to create a more optimised environment.
A unified multi-site technology solution increases productivity by enabling collaboration on a document across multiple sites, transferring or queuing calls across multiple offices or even creating meetings or video conferences with colleagues in another location.
3. Happy Customers
A good multi-site technology solution will keep customers happy, allowing them to simply and easily speak to your team with ease. A good multi-site telephone system will provide good over-the-phone experience and ensuring no calls drop off.
