Business VoIP

USF and Flat-Rate Pricing Plan (Part 1)

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Federal legislation played a huge role in the formation of the country’s telecom industry. Today, new bills and acts passed by the U.S. Government continue to shape the present and future of our field. One of the biggest acts to pass over the last couple of decades was the Telecommunications Act of 1996. This act represented the first major overhaul of the U.S. telecom field in over 60 years. It basically set the shape of the modern communications industry. This was the first act to take the internet into consideration. Yet even though the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was prescient in some ways it failed to predict one of the biggest changes in the telecom market. Over the last 15 years, flat-rate calling plans spread all over the U.S. Nowhere is this oversight more apparent than the formation of the Universal Service Fund (USF).

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Do I need a VoIP Expert to Configure My PBX?

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From my experience simply buying the latest-and-greatest PBX system does not always guarantee the benefit to a customer. It’s like getting a health club membership but not making a lifestyle change necessary to take advantage of your membership.

What I have been observing here, at DLS, time after time, is that even after making a decision to subscribe to our hosted PBX service, the first order of business for most clients is to imitate the way the old system worked.

This sounds like a great idea from the prospective lowering the incline of a learning curve and quelling the unrest of users who are less receptive to innovation (regardless of whether it’s good or bad for business). Unfortunately, many companies get stuck in that “transitional” configuration and never bother to move past it.

Can you greatly improve your customer’s satisfaction or employee efficiency by upgrading to a new phone system or hosted VoIP service? Absolutely! But if you don’t configure your new PBX properly then it could very well deliver mediocre results similar to those of a decade-old clunker you’ve been keeping together with duct-tape.  Really, it is hard to unleash full ROI potential when your new PBX setup imitates the old one.

Another problem is that an unfortunate number of small business owners have no idea how to best configure or provision their new phone system setups even after spending a few days on administrator and user training sessions.

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VoIP SPAM as We Know It

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VoIP technology has clear advantages over traditional circuit switched telephony. One of the most prominent advantages of Hosted VoIP is its relative affordability as call volume scales up. We call it “price-performance”. Unfortunately ethical and legal business operators are not the only ones to take advantage of this benefit. Accessibility of hosted VoIP resulted in lowering the cost of predictive dialing (technology allowing a PBX system to place many calls automatically).

This spam takes interactive and non-interactive forms. By interactive I mean any unsolicited robotic calls that let you talk to a live agent. Non-interactive spam is typically presented as message broadcasts (be they text, voice or email).

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A Word About YOUR Call Recording Storage

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A Word About YOUR Call Recording Storage

Call recording storage is not something most providers often speak of. It is considered an inner working of their infrastructure and usually is not visible to the public eye. Yet it is important for YOU to know that your hosted system is provisioned to record and keep all the calls you want it to. One of the great benefits of switching your business telephony over to Hosted VoIP lies in just how easy hosted systems make call recording appear. In a hosted environment you don’t need to worry about hooking up dedicated call recording devices or converting physical audio files to bits and bytes after the fact. Hosted PBX systems let you automatically record and save a copy of every single call running through your organization’s communication channels without giving the process a second thought.

Well, that’s not really true. All those recorded calls must be mixed, encoded and then need to go somewhere. If your hosted VoIP service provider’s storage systems aren’t robust enough or you will never get to take advantage of the full benefits offered by persistent call recording. After all, the great benefit of persistent call recording lies within the ability to pull up calls made years ago with little more than the click of your mouse. And you can’t do that if you only have enough storage to hold on to calls made within the last six months.

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Disruptive Nature of Automated Transcription and Call Indexing

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In the past I wrote about the enormous complexities facing developers of speech recognition algorithms. These complexities are what keep seemingly promising new technology from reaching us. However, if history taught us anything, it’s that we, humans, are a creative and a relentless bunch and that sooner or later these technical challenges will be succumb to our ingenuity.

Disruptive Nature of Automated Transcription and Call IndexingOver the last decade we’ve seen a number of incredible advances in the field of VoIP services and phone systems. From integrated video conferencing technologies to precisely calibrated self-learning algorithms for automated outbound calling and inbound reception, many businesses telephony services bear little more than a passing resemblance to their predecessors from the 20th century- and that’s a good thing!

Yet, as impressive as these improvements have been over the last 5-10 years, they are nothing compared to the advances we expect to see in coming years.

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The Bizarre Persistence of Toll Free Numbers

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In a perfect world, technology would advance smoothly and predictably. Every year we’d see advancements within the technologies we know and love and  everyone would adopt these new technologies as they became available, and we’d all benefit from operating at the highest possible level our modern technology affords.

Too bad, we don’t live in this perfect world. Communication technology advances at a crawl and then surge forward, organizations fail to keep up even when the benefits are clear, and all of us have to negotiate an uneven technological terrain.

Most of these imperfections are due to economic reasons, but some of them lie within peculiarities of human behavior, lack of information and irrational attachments. To understand what I mean, look no further than one of the most stubborn holdouts of days of telephony technology gone by- the toll free number.

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Freedom to Choose Your Voice Service Provider?

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Franchising business offers a good opportunity to various levels of business expertise and investment capital. Studies show that 97% of franchise businesses are still operating after the first year, compared to only 62% of independently owned. In most agency relationships, the franchisors are the risk takers whereas the franchisees prefer to steer clear of risks. In a franchising relationship, the franchisor and franchisee usually have different objectives

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Questions to Ask Hosted PBX Service Provider References

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Signing up for a new VoIP Hosted PBX service is a big deal, and a decision you don’t want to make lightly. While it’s tempting to simply go with the cheapest VoIP service you can find, the best way to learn whether a hosted PBX provider is really worth hiring is to ask for references. Once you compile a list of references, you need to grill the hell out of the poor souls you call up looking for information.

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Budget PBX – Yes, It’s Possible!

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Why haven’t you moved your company to the hosted PBX yet?

What do you mean “you’ve only had your current phone system for five years”? Did you keep your cell phone for five years?

Maybe you think that VoIP technology doesn’t move as fast? It does. Well, with the hosted PBX the cool thing is that in most cases, all you need to do to stay current is buy some new handsets! The rest of it practically upgrades itself assuming your service provider wants to keep your business over time.

Easy or not, it’s not uncommon for many companies to not touch their office phone systems for nearly a decade. The problem with this approach is that business technologies evolve and you have to evolve with them or you run a real risk of relying on some antiquated business practices which your clients will sooner or later notice.

Today, if your PBX handset is more than three years old, it may be time to upgrade it to something a bit more recent.

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