June 30, 2015
Requiem for Your Land Line
Telephone Service
The discussion of whether to move to VOIP telephone service is a moot point. The remaining question is what kind or service you will choose? If you’re unsure of your options, we need to talk!
Requiem for Your Land Line Telephone Service
I’m sorry if I’m the first one to inform you that our old friend, the land line telephone died the other day, although it is on life support for a time. If you are still using a POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) you are un-doubtedly aware that parts for your aging on-site PBX are scarce and find-ing a technician is near impossible. So you’ve known the change was
com-ing, but have you considered how to change, what services do you want
that will benefit your business the most? It’s an import choice.
A week ago Sprint filed papers with the FCC to discontinue long
distance service from any land line customer they have. In the
fil-ing, http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/
view;ECFSSESSION=Jk9nVMpb00bjkxqRtpP0RBDV92xJLSR1hs 72qqxhvHNLXVzWN0dQ!-1673700907!-160118126?
id=60001090524 which is available to download from that address, the company argues that there would be no material harm or dam-age to affected customers because of the availability of alternative solutions. That argument had to be addressed immediately be-cause the telephone system is a regulated public utility. Sprint has requested a September 19th date to relieve themselves of their ex-isting land line infrastructure, pending approval of this change. So quietly and without fanfare your old friend the POTS is about to be pulled from life support. The competition to replace service with IP service will get intense, a critical point made by Verizon a brief they filed on June 29th in opposition to a proposal by XO Communications that any plan to retire copper line access be delayed for one year. Verizon made the point that any such notice would put them at a disadvantage competitively in any area designated for the switch to fiber optics or Wi-Fi.
Some small businesses have already committed to a switch with their cur-rent supplier’s POTS replica systems. The pitch is that you’re just replacing the wall outlet with an outlet on the modem and you can use your old
tele-phone handsets. It might seem like the easiest thing to do, but is it the best
Replacing one telephone system that doesn’t integrate with your computer, that can’t forward calls to a cellphone nor support any kind of video confer-encing with another system exactly the same is neither cost effective nor an asset to your business.
Since the 2010 version of Microsoft Office, they’ve had as part of the plat-form a module called Lync, recently repackaged as Skype for Business. This module enabled the smallest of businesses to enjoy Unified Commu-nication, or UC for short. The problem has been that it didn’t work unless your telephone calls were routed through that other connector, an Ethernet cable. In other words to achieve the benefits of UC you needed to be using
hosted VOIP. What are the benefits you’ve missed?
Productivity! See if this simple explanation I gave one business
owner rings any bells with you.
“John”, in his office 65 feet from the owner, leaves his desk
and walks down the corridor to have a word with the owner. It takes 24 seconds to walk 65 feet. If “John” is not stopped along the way and engaged in a conversation or stop by the break room for coffee. Then at the owner’s door, “John” sees the owner on the phone and hangs out waiting for the owner to be free so he can conduct his 30 second inquiry and get an answer. After that interchange, “John” heads back to his office, perhaps again stopping to talk with “Mary” about a delivery hold up. The total time, from the time “John” left his desk, walked 65 feet, talked with the owner for 30 seconds and re-turned the 65 feet to his desk may have actually taken 7 to 9 minutes to complete. There are five other employees who do the same thing, each perhaps three times a day. That is a total time each day of 126 minutes. Just over two hours. Times 300
work days that amounts to 37,800 hours or 4,725 8hr. work
days. If the owner pays $15.00 per hour, that amounts to
$567,000 per year of non-productive time. All from the unno-ticed 7 minutes away from the desk
conferencing simple. A glance can show if the warehouse manager is busy or available while talking with a client about delivery. Include multiple peo-ple quickly and easily. Never again check times for a physical trip to the meeting room. Don’t be shackled with cross town trips. A restaurant with several locations can have a video conference with store managers in a dozen cities across three time zones and only use the exact time of the meeting, be sure that each location gets the same message and be able to switch back to other matters in seconds. Collaborate on a client proposal from an airport in New Zealand, with a manufacturer in Saginaw, Michigan,
sales staff in Miami and a freight company in Phoenix. Have your “virtual
assistant” take and route calls, even to your cell phone automatically or choose to have a particular call go to the online voice mail inbox accessible anytime from any place.
In addition there are the new frontiers of automated marketing and pro-grammatic customer service, personalized and segmented to focus on spe-cific products or services. The type of marketing shown to produce a higher level of customer satisfaction, increase sales and feed that customer satis-faction back into social media without hiring anyone additional or with spe-cialized talents.
Just today, Microsoft announced that Skype for business will soon have the capability of conducting conference calls and presentations with as many as 10,000 participants. That translates into being the keynote speaker at the largest convention assembly you’ve ever attended.
You will be getting the new Windows 10 operating system in four weeks. How many of the new functions and productivity tools will you be unable to use because of inaccurately judging the benefits of using hosted PBX ? So to wrap this up. You will very soon be forced to choose between VOIP that simply imitates your old telephone system, or put your business into a
turbocharged VOIP system that supports unified communication and data collection for use in a cutting edge marketing, sales and fulfillment
environ-ment. Either option costs about the same, both are VOIP but only one
re-turns more on your investment by increasing productivity, saving repetitive manual operations and delivering increased revenue and higher customer satisfaction.
I don’t expect that every business owner, enterprise to single entrepreneur will have the full understanding of all these potential benefits nor a com-plete knowledge of pricing. If you need to have this explained in greater de-tail or just have some questions that you’d like an opinion on, a free, no ob-ligation one-on-one consultation is available now. Just call 855-232-9019 or
send an email and get some straight answers to any question you have.
For complete technical and pricing options call 855-960-0184 and Greg can give you a quote immediately and one month of free service.
