How VoIP Will Revolutionise Your Small Business Telephony
For a small business, telephony costs can represent a sizable proportion of total variable costs. Consequently it makes sense to try and reduce your phone bill in any means possible. VoIP (or voice-over internet-protocol) is a method that is becoming increasingly popular by small business owners and employees to communicate on the phone, but via the Internet instead of a normal landline. All you need is the simple and free to install software and a high quality headset with a boom microphone ideally. According to a survey released by BT on the 27th March 2007, over 25% of SME’s are currently utilising VoIP, and this is set to rise to 48% over the coming year! This has the potential to save businesses a fortune, read on to find out how.
Unlike a regular phone service, so long as you have Broadband internet you don’t have to pay any extra line rental for using VoIP, as the voice communication data is sent via the Internet. Although there are a few major VoIP providers, Skype is the one with which I have had the most experience, and in my opinion the service provides many benefits to cost-conscious businesses and hence to improving cost efficiency. Firstly, for intra-company communication, if all your colleagues and employees have Skype installed then you can call them for as long as you want with Skype and not pay a single thing. In addition, if your employees are on business in far-away places you can communicate with them over VoIP once again for nothing! Gone are the days of long-distance call charges, if you both have a high-speed internet connection and the required software installed then your call costs will be zero. It seems too good to be true, right? Well in principle it’s a perfect solution, but there are a few limitations which you should be aware of:
Firstly, you may have worries about call quality issues or reliability of service. Well personally I have used Skype for about a year now and not experienced any problems beyond a few initial headaches whilst figuring out how to configure the headset microphone and sound card. For over 95% of the time call quality has been as good as over a normal landline, however if communicating with distant places half way around the world, then obviously the quality of the call depends on the speed of both party’s internet connection, and also the state of the telephone infrastructure in the other country. Secondly, for you to receive or place a call using VoIP, your computer must be switched on and you must be logged into Skype.
Going one step further, VoIP can also be used as a full scale replacement of your existing phone network. The first solution offered by Skype is SkypeOut, in which you can top-up your balance online on their website using your credit card, and this enables you to call regular phone numbers for extremely discounted prices. Currently, the call rate is roughly 1p per minute to call a UK landline from within the UK, and is only about 3p per minute to call the USA! How this works is that imagine you are calling Florida from your computer in the UK – you dial the number into Skype and it travels via VOIP over the Internet and your call pops out at the telephone exchange in Florida – hence the only call charges you pay are a local call charge between the telephone exchange in Florida and the person you are calling.
Another useful product is SkypeIn, whereby you can buy (and even choose) a telephone number in any one of about 15 countries. Anybody can then call this number, and so long as you are logged into Skype your call will be put through to you on your computer, wherever you are in the world. The only fees you pay are the annual fee for keeping that number (which is currently a small fee of about £20 per year), and you don’t pay any fees for people calling this number. This has the obvious benefits that you can take your phone with you wherever you go around the world, as long as you have access to high speed internet (even 512Kbs should be sufficient though to make high quality calls). Don’t worry about not having your computer switched on 24/7 – there is also a voicemail service provided free with SkypeIn for all those times when you just want to ‘switch off’.
With more and more businesses jumping on the VoIP bandwagon, it’s definitely worth considering to reduce costs and even increase flexibility!
Written by Chris Pangburn.
