Voice over IP (VoIP) is a major telecommunications trend, and there are good reasons why. Contact centers are increasingly moving to VoIP solutions for reduced costs, lack of geographical constraints, telecommuting possibilities and easy system updates, among others reasons.

“Since VoIP calls come through the Internet, long distance calls are not a worry any longer,” noted Stella Wilson on the Aguileon.com blog. “Long distance calls can be made for free depending on the provider and others come at reduced costs.”

Geographical constraints are reduced with VoIP, as employees can in many cases be hired from anywhere; there’s no need to have all agents in the same room any longer, or pulling talent from just one geographical area.

This opens up the possibilities for telecommuting, too.

“Call centers can now create a network of telecommuting workers whether they are stay-at-home mothers, students, disabled workers or others simply by implementing VoIP,” noted the blog.

System updates are a breeze, too, because in most cases the technology behind VoIP is hosted in the cloud instead of on-premises.

VoIP also makes call recording easier than ever. VoIP with call recording is a potent combination.

With VoIP call recording, it is possible to record and collect all calls and include disparate data sources along with the recording to make the recorded calls more useful.

Because the recordings often are in the cloud, it is possible to have centralized access to all recordings, as well as analysis of call volume, patterns and trends, noted Monet Software in a blog post last year.

The ease with which VoIP calls can be recorded lends itself to new call center training possibilities, too.

“One of the primary objectives of call recording is to use each call as a teaching moment for agents and a learning moment for management,” noted Monet in the blog post. Modern call recording software helps call centers find specific calls quickly, and be able to pull up calls based on date, caller, time of call, call length and other criteria.

Contact center analysis can also be done from recordings, driving efficiency.

As I noted in an article last year, workload distribution adjustments and changes in best practices that are gleaned from call recordings improve a call center’s performance, both in terms of happy customers and efficiency. This added efficiency can lead to reduced operating costs and better call center return on investment.

The benefits of VoIP are so clear, it is less a question of if a call center will switch to a VoIP-based solution and more of when.