SIP Trunking Explained Retailers Stand Benefit

Many businesses, especially retailers, experienced unusually high calls during times of crisis like the holiday season. SIP trunking is cost-effective to accommodate seasonal spikes without constantly over-resourcing your business’s phone system. So what is SIP trunking, you ask? Here’s a detailed explanation of SIP trunking: And how it works. And how retailers can benefit from it.

SIP Trunking Explained

What is SIP trunking, you ask? Session Initiation Protocol trunking (SIP) is a technology that moves phone calls from traditional phone lines to your data network. SIP trunking is often the backbone for modern business phone systems. In addition, it can link legacy phones and unified communications systems to your cloud, replacing the PRI trunks.

SIP trunking allows businesses to quickly upgrade legacy phone systems and access cloud-hosted voice data, video, text, or other unified communications. In addition, SIP trunking will enable retailers to reduce their telecommunications costs while navigating peak times with ease. These are all advantages of SIP trunking, which retailers will appreciate, especially when dealing with increased phone calls during the holiday season.

SIP trunking is becoming more popular with retailers as they realize the many benefits to their business, including cost savings and improved operational efficiency. According to Transparency Market Research, the retail sector will embrace SIP trunking over the next few years. As a result, this industry is projected to experience a compound annual growth rate (20.6 percent) between 2016-and 2024.

The Retailer’s Challenge with Peak Calling Periods

In the past, if you wanted your business to prepare for an increase in calls, you needed to buy and install extra permanent lines. For example, if a store receives 12 calls per day at a particular time, such as at 2 p.m. each day, it would need 12 phone lines to handle each call. It might not have enough capacity to handle all calls.

The retailer could purchase 12 phone service lines, which would allow it to answer all incoming calls. However, most lines may not be used during peak periods, leading to unnecessary expenses. The retailer would need to allocate more resources to each store to solve the problem. This could reduce the ROI. SIP trunking’s peak provisioning function gives retailers a better way of managing such capacity-planning needs. It eliminates the need to wonder if you have enough SIP trunks constantly.

SIP’s Solution: Peak Provisioning & Centralized Trunking

SIP for retailers allows businesses to plan for peak capacity across all their store locations. Each store will have its peak calling period, so the peak capacity required for all stores will be less than if each retailer had to resource each one.

Even though every retailer’s network seems to be flooded with calls at the same hour of the day, these peak periods may not co-occur if time zone differences are taken into account. Modern business phones with centralized SIP trunking can take advantage of time zone differences between different store locations and distribute their peak capacity across multiple time zones. This means that a retailer may need significantly less power, making it possible to accommodate peak calls for all its locations more efficiently and economically.

Instead of planning for each store individually and then over-resource it, retailers can now maximize their telecommunications investments in all their stores and get a much better ROI than they could just a few years ago.

Therefore, SIP trunking is a cost-saving option that allows retailers to ensure all their calls are connected without any problems, no matter what time it is.

SIP Trunks Centralizing Voice Features

SIP trunking has many other benefits. But SIP trunking can use by retailers who use cloud-based communication systems to improve their communications and reduce expenses. Also, SIP can centralize voice applications and call handling at the SIP trunk in retail, allowing all voice communications to manage from a single location.

Advanced phone system functions such as auto-attendants and interactive voice response ( IVR) menus can all be redirected so that they are handled using SIP trunks rather than the main internet link of the company. For example, when a call arrives at a retailer’s data center’s SIP trunks, it initiates an auto-attendant greeting. This directs the caller to the correct place and, if necessary, recites store hours or transfers the call to the accounting department for further follow-up.

This decreases the number of calls to stores and eliminates voice traffic on the retailer’s vast area network (WAN) or internet connection. This results in more significant cost savings and a better return on investment from the company’s telecoms investments.

SIP Trunking offers attractive cost savings

SIP trunking is a cost-saving option. Instead of paying for the entire calling capacity, companies only pay for what they use. It can use with both legacy and modern unified communications systems. In addition, SIP trunking can use immediately by retailers. Instead of investing in a new phone system or making a significant capital investment, businesses can upgrade their existing phones with SIP trunks.

Retailers are constantly looking to improve their customer service, especially during peak times. SIP trunking lets them make sure all their calls can connect without any problems, no matter what time it is, at all stores, and save money and avoid expensive system upgrades.