While the cost benefits of VoIP service can be quantified by curious parties, the productivity gains that are often cited as the solution's primary benefit are not so much. However, according to a release by a leading telecommunications company, five metrics can weigh the return on investment (ROI) of VoIP and related services.

Seamless call routing, low cost real estate moves, reduced cable infrastructure management, presence tools and consolidated messaging all help professionals work more efficiently and waste less time when it comes to daily operations. Many of these benefits associated with VoIP PBX are seen as cost savings, but also have productivity advantages as well. Workers, particularly in a call center, get more work done smoothly with VoIP, without worrying as much about dropping calls, or missing important work as with clunky, legacy phone systems.

According to Joe Kramschuster, an industry expert, once the savings from these benefits is added together, a contact center with just 10 employees could save a minimum of $1,000 annually from increased productivity of its agents alone.

ContactBabel, an independent contact center analyst firm, recently released a study showing that virtual and cloud-based centers have shorter queue times and fewer problems associated with call spikes than non-cloud centers.

The report was based on information gathered from surveys generated by over 200 contact center operations leaders in the United States, and showed strong increases to center efficiency and profit related to improving IT and communications technology.

"The results from this year’s survey show an industry-wide acknowledgment that IT systems require urgent improvement" said Steve Morrell, author of the survey. "Most businesses are looking into cloud-based solutions as an option that can often provide increased functionality with a favorable cost-structure."

According to the report, 71 percent of contact centers that invested in cloud VoIP or other virtual solutions saw a decrease in call queue lengths, and about two-thirds saw a reduction in call spikes. Additionally, 68 percent reported better functionality, while 63 percent acknowledged that migrating to a hosted phone system lowered the overall cost of ownership. The cloud is clearly providing an advantage for many businesses.

The flexible nature of unified communications provides important benefits for companies deploying a UC solution. However, not all UC services are the same, and choosing one that doesn't meet a business's specific needs can result in missing out on one of the key benefits – interoperability. According to TechTarget, interoperability is critical to UC for providing seamless integration of the various communication tools that make up the solution, such as VoIP service.

Whether focusing on on-premise VoIP PBX or cloud-based solutions, a business needs to ensure that the UC services that it chooses integrate with each other within their platforms in order to maintain the flexibility that makes UC beneficial.

"When it comes to interoperability, there is the potential for vendors not to work well together," said Michael Osterman, president of Osterman Research, according to the news source. "Enterprises must be selective. It's all in how you choose the right vendors to integrate with."

Hosted solutions are one way for a business to approach this problem, as they already take care of the integration problem for users, even with multi-vendor systems. According to the news source, UC is not a one-size fits all service though, and even with a cloud solution, a business needs to ensure that the various tools meet all of its needs before investing.

Online phone service is growing in popularity for businesses for many reasons. Some companies adopt VoIP for reliability, others for improved quality for some combination of benefits. Almost all businesses choose IP-based solutions for cost savings.

According to PCWorld, the savings that VoIP service provides is not the only benefit . Increased security can be a major factor for many businesses to consider.

By implementing VoIP through virtual private networks, a company can increase the security of the system, while still gaining all of the other benefits, like reliability, call forwarding and other helpful phone system improvements. Additionally, by choosing a hosted VoIP solution, a company does not have to worry about maintaining the system itself, convenient for smaller businesses with few, or even no, IT professionals.

The most expensive part of a phone bill is the minutes used, according to the news source, and VoIP can remove that expense, passing voice through broadband along with data, combining these costs and ultimately the savings.

Cloud communications can provide vital cost savings while still supporting company growth, flexibility and other important benefits, according to Dynamic Business. One of the most important factors in business communications is cost efficiency, which tools like cloud VoIP and hosted PBX can provide without reducing the quality of the systems. In fact, cloud-based solutions offer improved features that many legacy solutions do not, as well as improved audio quality.

Deploying cloud solutions is a reliable way to provide support for business flexibility and scalability as well. Any growing business needs to supply the collaboration tools that operations demand without drastically increasing network-related costs, and the cloud gives them this option, as well as the ability to open new offices or allow employees to work remotely without implementing new infrastructure.

"Companies are investigating smarter ways to build agility into their operations," said industry expert William Willems, according to the news source. "Pay-as-you-go is top of mind in these circumstances, be it through using more cloud applications or moving to a flexible workplace model."

With the expansion of cloud technology, more businesses can see savings while improving support and keeping up with the most advanced communication solutions available.

While many businesses are increasing voice over IP adoption, not all are implementing it as their primary communications tool. According to ihotdesk, by deploying VoIP service as a backup line to analog telephones, a business is actually missing out on many of the benefits that IP telephony offers.

Trefor Davies, a council member of the Internet Telephony Service Providers' Association in the U.K., told the news source that VoIP should not remain a secondary thought in business communications for long.

"This is changing very quickly in the business world," Davies said. "VoIP is there in the background for many primary line services, but sometimes not until you hit the exchange and it is therefore invisible to end users."

As more businesses adopt VoIP, the benefits should become more obvious. Cost savings, employee productivity and quality of service will all increase with a properly deployed hosted phone system, and according to Davies, increasing adoption is a good sign that more businesses are beginning to recognize this.

Migrating from legacy PBX to a cloud-based unified communications solution can be a big step for a company. With so many different options and benefits, the move can be complex, and it is important for a company considering UC to have a clear idea of how to meet business needs and still achieve the cost savings these solutions promise.

While this may be an easy step, as cloud-based UC is flexible and customizable, by taking these processes very seriously and carefully choosing the tools that it will best utilize, a company can significantly improve the savings by moving to VoIP PBX and other IP-based solutions, according to a new report by Osterman Research.

The research firm found that a "best-of-breed" approach to UC, one that carefully combines the necessary tools for business operations without adding on any excess services, can not only avoid unneeded costs, but actually reduce costs as well, with less power consumption and avoiding replacement of unneeded systems.

A properly implemented UC solution will provide numerous benefits for a business, but none as important as lowering IT budgets and improving employee productivity.

A new study of SIP-based technologies found that the average business sees a productivity increase of 23 percent with unified communications implementation. A total of 1.21 hours per employee per day, this can reach savings of $13,000 annually per worker for an average company. The study, 2012 Economic Impact of SIP in the Enterprise, was commissioned by a leading SIP communications company.

Taking data from 267 large businesses, the study shows that most companies saw a 75 percent reduction of IT telecom bills after deploying a VoIP PBX solution as well. However, the new data on productivity savings offers a previously-unquantified look at this specific UC benefit, which many businesses have sought.

Having a firmer idea of the actual savings provided by the less concrete advantages of hosted PBX can better help a business pick the best communications solution. The flexibility of UC solutions can help potentially help these businesses improve these benefits even more. By only integrating the specific services that meet operational needs, a company can lower the initial cost of UC deployment and reduce the unnecessary information employees have to sort through to access the tools they need.

Unified communications solutions are quickly becoming one of the most common new technology services implemented by a business. However, many companies struggle to establish a firm return on investment (ROI) analysis for UC. According to No Jitter contributor Gary Audin, this doesn't have to be the case, especially with hosted PBX solutions.

One way to help bolster and ROI analysis is to examine the total cost of ownership (TCO) of any communications solution, according to Audin. TCO, or the analysis of all the costs related to implementing and maintaining a UC service over a given period of time, can provide vital insight when comparing VoIP PBX to legacy PBX systems and other aspects of UC to current services.

Audin states, however, that many businesses over-anticipate the length of time needed to analysis TCO and ROI estimates. A recent Information Week survey shows that many companies plan to examine the ROI of cloud communications solutions for three-to-five years. Audin states that this may never prove these calculations though, because technology evolves too quickly for a single UC solution to remain optimal in that timespan.

The average professional spends 242 minutes every day in communications limbo. This is not time wasted intentionally, but rather spent trying to contact a colleague, repeating conversations, scheduling meetings and other work-related activities. A recent infographic at Payscale shows that these tasks take up about 50 percent of a professional's "wasted time" on any given day, and can cost a company hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

However, deploying unified communications solutions can easily reduce these losses by half. According to the graphic, by implementing cloud-based UC services like hosted VoIP a company can speed up access to collaboration tools, helping workers be more productive during the day, in addition to the other benefits that these systems provide, like cost savings on IT budgets.

One important feature that UC provides is conferencing support, removing the need to repeat conversations with multiple coworkers. Combined with other time-saving features, like reducing downtime trying to contact a colleague or sort through spam email, this can save the average worker 115.5 minutes or more each day.

UC not only helps increase productivity, but is also a flexible solution that can help a company stay on top of modern trends and changes in the business world, while reducing overall costs and increasing revenue.