10 Critical Questions to Ask Before Migrating to a New VoIP Phone Service

pcmag.com:

With the rise of hybrid work, the widely distributed nature of today's workforce means you'll probably be in the market for a voice-over-IP (VoIP) system sooner or later. A cloud PBX not only lets your IT staff manage everyone's phone from a central location, it's also an easy way to keep a distributed team looking unified while offering a direct path to unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS). It will also provide better performance for a growing number of users, heightened security, and more thorough call accounting and reporting capabilities, so you'll have a much better idea of what you're spending and where.

Whether you haven't made the transition to VoIP yet or you're looking to change providers, your first consideration needs to be whether you want a phone system in the cloud or your building. There are several reasons to choose one over the other. Still, in general, cloud-based phone systems have a lower upfront cost and are much more agile if your company's communications needs suddenly change or your users want to adopt a new, cutting-edge set of features. That said, in-house phone systems have a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and potentially better security.

But that's only the beginning. While you could just sign up with a VoIP provider and make do with whatever features it offers, a better idea is to think carefully about what you want the phone system to do, how you want it to interact with your existing business, and what features you think are necessary. To do that, you'll need to sit down with not only your senior leadership team but also the business' frontline managers to determine how your current phone system is being used. That's the only safe way to discover what features your workers