Its an ideal world, and you have a telephone system which helps you to improve employee productivity, enhance customer service and lower costs. If that sounds like you, then the good news is that you are already ahead of the game…the vast majority of people unfortunately wouldn’t say that their phone system does anything positive for them (Granite Communications is trying to change this one customer at a time!). The bad news, though, for you fortunate few with a productive telephone system – It could be even more productive.
In addition to the obvious functions as simple as answering and processing telephone calls and retrieving voicemail messages, today’s phone systems also afford the opportunity to improve business productivity in far less obvious ways. For example, Call Accounting, or Call Detail Reporting, can be employed as a built-in or add-on functionality of one’s business telephone system.
A Call Accounting system allows you to collect raw call data from your telephone system, and sort and present it in just about any manner you would like. This could mean tracking salespeople’s telephone activity for business development, analyzing the average wait time for someone calling your customer service group, or even just to determine the order activity of your best customers. Really, there are any number of possibilities for how to utilize this type of Call Detail Report…in almost every case, it would undoubtedly increase the impact of your telephone system on your business’s productivity and bottom line.
This has come up several times over the past few weeks. We run into hosted providers telling our customers that they can provide telephone service over their existing internet connections. While there are many good hosted phone providers, there are many who are using price as their lead and making bad suggestions.
This is an article I copied from Netequalizer (no author given) dated August 29, 2010 which does a good job answering the question: Can voice traffic over open internet provide toll quality voice?
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QoS Over The Internet – Is it possible? Five Must-Know Facts— I had an inquiry from a potential customer yesterday asking if we could monitor their QoS. I was a bit miffed as to what to tell them. At first, the question struck me as if they’d asked if we can monitor electrons on their power grid. In other words, it was a legitimate question in a sense, but of what use would it be to monitor QoS? I then asked him why he had implemented QoS in the first place. How did he know he needed it? After inquiring a bit deeper, I also found out this customer was using extensive VPNs to remote offices over DSL internet circuits. His WAN traffic from the remote offices was sharing links with regular Internet data traffic, and all of it was traversing the public Internet. Then it hit me – he did not realize his QoS mechanisms were useless outside of his internal network. Where there is one customer with confusion there are usually others. Hence, I’ve put together a quick fact sheet on QoS over an internet link. Below, you’ll find five quick facts that should help clarify QoS and answer the primary question of it’s possible over the Internet.
Fact #1 If your QoS mechanism involves modifying packets with special instructions (ToS bits) on how it should be treated, it will only work on links where you control both ends of the circuit and everything in between.
Fact #2 Most Internet congestion is caused by incoming traffic. For data originating at your facility, you can certainly have your local router give priority to it on its way out, but you can’t set QoS bits on traffic coming into your network (We assume from a third party). Regulating outgoing traffic with ToS bits will not have any effect on incoming traffic.
Fact #3 Your public Internet provider will not treat ToS bits with any form of priority (The exception would be a contracted MPLS type network). Yes, they could, but if they did then everybody would game the system to get an advantage and they would not have much meaning anyway.
Fact #4 The next two facts address our initial question — Is QoS over the Internet possible? The answer is, yes, QoS on an Internet link is possible. We have spent the better part of seven years practicing this art form and it is not rocket science, but it does require a philosophical shift in thinking to get your arms around. We call it “equalizing,” or behavior-based shaping, and it involves monitoring incoming and outgoing streams on your Internet link. Priority or QoS is nothing more than favoring one stream’s packets over another stream’s. You can accomplish priority QoS on incoming streams by queuing (slowing down) one stream over another without relying on ToS bits.
Fact #5 Surprisingly, behavior-based methods can provide some level of QoS for VoIP on the public Internet. Although you can’t tell the Internet to send your VoIP packets faster, most people don’t realize the problem with congested VoIP is due to the fact that their VoIP packets are getting crowded out by large downloads. Often, the offending downloads are initiated by their own employees or users. A good behavior-based shaper will be able to favor VoIP streams over less essential data streams without any reliance on the sending party adhering to a QoS scheme.
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So, if you are speaking with a service provider and they are suggesting VoIP service, copy this article and ask what approach they are taking to make sure your calls are clear. It could save much pain.
www.granitecomm.com
Phone System Buyers Guide
Whether you have to buy a new phone system because yours is failing or you are evaluating investing in new technology, your purchase decision should be framed by the following objectives:
- Improve Employee Productivity
- Enhance Customer Service
- Lower Costs
If your phone system investment does not address at least one of these objectives, you are simply putting a new piece of plastic on your desk and likely missing an opportunity to improve your business.
The following are conversations you should be having with a prospective vendor. If the salesperson is not asking you these types of questions, you are working with the wrong person.
PRODUCTIVITY
- Do you have employees who work out of the office? Would it make sense for your customers to be able to reach them any time, any place?
- Does your staff carry smart phones or tablets? If they could manage their messages (voice, fax, e-mail) from their devices, would it help them do their jobs?
- Have you invested in a CRM or Sales Automation package? How important are metrics to your business?
- Do you keep business contacts in either a CRM system or in an Outlook Contacts or similar address book?
- Do you frequently have conference calls with multiple outside parties?
- Are you using cloud applications such as Google docs? Is your e-mail on an in-house server or hosted? Are technology initiatives moving to the cloud?
- Do you have IT staff that can handle changes to the system or will you need outside support?
- Does staff move within the office frequently?
- Do you have multiple locations? Can you transfer calls from location to location?
Enhance Customer Service
- Do you have either a formal or informal call center? Are your customers frequently looking for the same person or groups of people?
- Do your clients spend time waiting on hold for help?
- Would it be a benefit if your customers could call your staff directly?
- What is your customer’s biggest frustration when they call your company?
- Do you have to ask the same questions of many callers (i.e. what is your account number)?
- Is your turnaround time getting back to customers too long?
- Would call volume metrics make it easier to schedule staffing for key phone positions more effectively?
- Would it be useful to be able to record conversations? Is there a legal need to record calls? Do you bill your clients for time on the phone?
- Do you provide the same information repetitively? Are your clients calling to ask questions where the answer resides in a database?
- Do you need to confirm appointments or manage a schedule? Is there a need for mass notification?
Lower Costs
- When was the last time you reviewed your network services? Have you looked at what several carriers can provide for voice and internet access?
- Are you currently under contract with your carrier?
- Do you have dedicated to answering calls, if so, does the call volume vary?
- Are you expanding into new markets or geographic areas? How are you supporting the remote operations?
- Do you make international calls?
- Do you provide your staff with cell phones or reimburse staff for their personal cell plans?
- Do you track phone usage and assign costs to departments?
- If you have a call center, do you track agent productivity and follow trends?
- How much do you spend with your current vendor on service calls? How many times do you pay to have program changes or moves on your phone system?
- Do you have a budget for the technology investment? What ROI is acceptable?
A good first meeting with a prospective vendor will likely last about an hour.
Gregg Haughton
203-234-4901
Gregg@granitecomm.com
In previous blogs on this site, we have made reference to the various types of services that are available to customers with business telephone systems. When talking about phone line contracts expiring with an existing carrier, Eric Moore pointed out that there are many alternative options available to the customer, depending on the volume of phone calls that need to be accommodated, and what services are provided in that specific geographical location. Additionally, I had explained in my blog about the voice quality of VoIP telephone systems that the voice traffic coming from such a system to a destination outside of the system is carried by the services of the local dial tone provider (as opposed to over open Interenet).
If you are a smaller company in a business sector that does not require a great deal of call volume, individual telephone lines will be sufficient for your business. However, if your call volume dictates that you need as many as 10-12 or more paths for simultaneous conversations, it may be more efficient and economical to have your voice paths delivered via a digital or IP service. Similarly, if your business requires individual phone numbers (Direct Inward Dialing) for each person within the company, or if you depend heavily on multi-party conference calls, an alternative to analog telephone lines is also in order. Lastly, if you have special needs for your internet bandwidth in addition to your dial tone, there are combination services using digital or IP delivery which may be appropriate as well.
Most carriers - whether it is AT&T, another Local Exchange Carrier, or even one of the cable companies (Comcast, Cablevision, Cox, etc.) - are now providing dial tone via digital PRI circuits. A PRI will provide you with 23 channels for inbound and/or outbound phone calls, and the carrier can provide as many telephone numbers as you may need for Direct Inward Dialing. This becomes an economical alternative (based on cost comparison) if you are already paying for ~12 or more individual phone lines. If you do not require the call volume of 23 voice channels, but still have a need for Direct Inward Dialing phone numbers, SIP Trunks are another delivery option for your services. Not every carrier currently offers SIP trunks, but for those that do, they are able to provide dial tone via IP to your business telephone system, and can customize the amount of call paths to meet your needs (not confined to exactly 23 as with a PRI). While not as widely available, SIP trunks become a more economical option even if you have fewer than ~12 individual phone lines.
As you can see, if your business is of a certain size, and has certain needs, alternatives to basic analog telephone lines can be a very attractive option.
If you are either outgrowing your existing office space, or you have decided to relocate your business, there are probably a million different things that you are worried about in order to make sure that your new space lives up to expectations. Among many other things, you will inevitably be moving or adding new computer workstations and telephones…It may seem obvious to some, but you may be surprised to find out just how many customers that I have encountered who hadn’t considered that their computers and telephones in new office space would require new internal wiring, until it was much too late to provide that efficiently!
Obviously an afterthought to some, the voice and data cabling of new office space is actually among the first things that needs to be considered when planning the build-out for your company. Right along with the physical layout of the space, the ceilings, HVAC & electrical considerations, the low voltage cabling required to support your voice and/or data network needs to be planned for from an early stage. From a construction standpoint, it is much more efficient to run voice and data cables in the earlier stages of a build-out, after walls have been erected, but before they have been closed in (also while the ceiling is still “open construction”).
As a result, it is advantageous to determine exactly where you will need to locate devices like telephones, computers, printers, registers, credit card machines, speakers, etc. Additionally, the data speed that is required of your computer network will determine the grade of cable that will need to be used. Other variables that will need to be considered include what type of business phone system you will be using (if it is a VoIP phone system, each phone may require a separate data jack), whether any locations require additional jacks for multiple devices or potential future use, and how furniture (cubicles, conference tables) may affect the layout of cables.
The bottom line is this: if you are moving your offices to another location, or if you are adding on to your existing space, and it will require changing the build-out of that space, it is important to consider the voice and data cabling infrastructure early on in the process…it is far easier (and cheaper!) to run extra cables in open construction than it is when everything is closed up and you have been up and running three years later!
Over the years, I have designed many disaster recovery plans when deploying a new business phone systems.
What do they say about the best laid plans?
You can have multiple carriers, automated dial tone fail over, and the most carefully designed plan... and then a dump truck goes down the road with the bed up and...snap...the lines to your building are gone and you are out of service (this happened).
Or, you build a hot Disaster Recovery site with redundant services and live sync between the sites and two teenagers build a camp fire on the eastern bank of the Housatonic River. They melt a major fiber optic cable and take down much of the Northeast (this happened also).
Can someone say "self healing Sonic Ring"? Increasingly complex networks have increasingly complex problems. There are no 100% redundant solutions. What can go wrong, will go wrong.
Here's an easy, inexpensive and quite reliable option to make sure your customers can reach someone if your regular telephone services are down, your office is unaccesible, or there are campers in your neighborhood:
1) Make sure you have call fowarding as part of your telephone services package. This is usually free. Some carriers offer direct trunk overflow (DTO) which will automatically failover to another phone number. Make sure you know how to activate this service and have the number to call to activate this service handy.
2) Set up a cell phone account. This can be someones personal account, or better, an account set aside for emergency purposes. You don't need to have a ton of minutes or an expensive phone. We are really just interested in the cellular phone number and plan.
3) Make sure the cell account has a voice mail box. Record a greeting that tells callers if they have reached this message, there has been a disruption in the business phone service and ask the caller to leave a message. Tell them someone will return your call shortly.
4) Activate the voice mail to e-mail feature of the cell providers voice mailbox and have the e-mail delivered to a e-mail address that will be accessed by key people. This should be a g-mail account or some other cloud based e-mail provider.
When your service goes down, call foward your number to the emergency cell phone number and then log onto the e-mails account to retrieve the voice messages. You can then either call the folks back, or forward the messages to others in your company to handle.
This works as long as your regular carrier is not so disabled that they can't forward calls and the cell provider is not also out of service. For most incidents, this plan works well.
Smores anyone?
I finally decided to get a new phone system for my business…now what?
Hopefully you have selected a provider that will help you through each step of installing your new system and removing your old one. Regardless, there are a number of things that need to be considered, and a number of decisions to make that will affect the ultimate success of this transition.
If you are migrating from a traditional digital-based phone system to a new Voice Over IP System, the two systems can likely be set up in tandem, as they would not use the same wiring infrastructure. If this is the case, the transition from one system to the other can be done quite smoothly. The only step which will result in down time for your business will be when you switch your outside telephone service from one system to the other.
On the other hand, if the new phone system that you are implementing needs to use the same jacks that your existing system does, there will be some additional down time that you will need to plan for. In this case, each old telephone will need to be switched out with its replacement one-by-one, so that each individual user will experience a short period in which they would not be able to make or receive telephone calls.
Again, assuming that you have a system provider that maps the transition out for you, regardless of which situation you find yourself in, the amount of true downtime (in which your communications system is completely out of service) should really be at a minimal level.
If telephone communications are absolutely essential to your business, and you cannot afford to sustain even a few minutes of downtime, it is advisable to schedule the transition from one phone system to another during off hours for your business.
At Granite Communications, we encounter all manner of changes from one system to another, and understand that it is up to the individual business that is taking the step of changing to a new telephone system solution, so all potential schedules can be accommodated. It is important, however, that the business making this change considers all of the elements and plans accordingly when it comes time to making the final transition.
You are probably saying to yourself “I thought Answering Services have been a thing of the past for ten years!”. You might be surprised. I have worked with countless business phone systems for organizations that are still, even today, reliant on subscription-based outsourced answering services. Admittedly, the far majority of these are in the medical (or dental, or veterinary, etc.) community, as they naturally have a greater need to ensure that every single call from a patient gets answered appropriately.
As telephone systems, and more specifically voicemail systems, have evolved over the years, businesses have had the opportunity to migrate their after-hours answering responsibilities from the recurring cost of a service that has live humans answering all calls to automated attendants which not only eliminate the need to pay a service on a regular basis, but also will route calls to their intended destination. For industries that do not typically receive emergency level phone calls during non-business hours, this was an easy switch to make…basically a no-brainer. However, for those in the medical industry, or any others for which emergency calls can be received during off hours, there continues to be trepidation that an automated attendant simply cannot replicate the level of service provided by a human being answering a phone call.
We are finding now, though, that because of further advancements in the technology of current voicemail systems, they have the ability to effectively replicate the duties that a live answering service can provide, even in emergency situations. Granite Communications has many clients which have implemented this level of use for their voicemail systems. Using the options available in today’s voicemails, there are medical facilities (and property management companies, and plumbers, and oil/heating companies, etc.) which can simply direct callers to a designated emergency mailbox, which can then immediately notify – by home phone, cell phone, beeper, even e-mail – an on-call Doctor, or technician, or serviceman. This allows the on-call professional to quickly respond to emergency requests from their patients/customers.
Of course there are still operations out there with the philosophy that the only way to properly handle these type of calls is with a live answer 24/7…but as the technology has advanced, so too have the options available to companies in this situation.
2011 can be a great year financially, you can save money and get new equipment to improve productivity and enhance customer service!
Section 179 of the United States Internal Revenue Code (26 U.S.C. § 179), allows a taxpayer to elect to deduct the cost of certain types of property on their income taxes as an expense, rather than requiring the cost of the property to be capitalized and depreciated. This property is generally limited to tangible, depreciable, personal property which is acquired by purchase for use in the active conduct of a trade or business. You can expense up to $500,000 in 2011.
This deduction maximum is slated to be reduced to $125,000 at the end of 2011. Though Congress could elect to extend the higher allowance, don't count on it in the current political environment.
So how can this program allow you to save money on a business phone system? Let's look at the following expample:
- You buy a new business phone system for $20,000
- Let's assume you are in the 35% income tax bracket
- You expense the entire system in 2011 according to section 179 rules
- Your savings is 20,000 X .35 or $7000
Many businesses have cash flow constraints at year end that make a $20,000 outlay difficult. You can lease a business phone system to conserve cash and still take the deduction. This can be like Uncle Sam making the first 14 payments for you. Here's the example:
- You Lease a $20,000 phone system over 60 months at $475 per month
- You take the 179 deduction and save $7000 (35% rate)
- The first 14 months are on Uncle Sam
By investing in a new phone system that will improve your team's productivity and enhance the service you provide for your customers, the 179 deduction will lower the cost.
Note: I am not an accountant and your situation may be different than the example. You should speak with your accountant to see if the 179 deduction works for your business.
Here are the top 10 reasons to buy an new phone system
10) You are still using a Rolodex to look up phone numbers.
9) When you do a Google search on your system to find parts, there are no results.
8) Your music on hold is a mix tape of REO Speedwagon, Loverboy and Simple Minds Live.
7) You have a separate account on your P&L for telephone repair and it's the only account with double digit growth.
6) You bring your daughter into work, and she doesn't recognize your telephone.
5) ATT sends you Thank You cards at all major holidays.
4) You have to sing the 3 tone into the phone when you dial because your 3 button does not work.
3) You hire a temp to work the phones and he can't stop giggling.
2) You have cauliflower ear because you have to push the earpiece hard to your head to hear people.
And #1 top reason you know it's time to buy an new phone system...
You form a SuperCommittee of your top staff and they actually agree that it's time to buy an new system!