Products & Services

Reducing ongoing monthly/quarterly telephone service charges for businesses with multiple sites is the biggest single area of cost saving through VoIP adoption.

Customers with multiple sites will either have to pay call charges for their calls from one office to another or they will be paying for a leased line between sites. Leased lines for telephone calls can be very expensive.

Voice over IP allows calls to be made between your sites over your data network and as with emails there is no cost at all.

Businesses that have sites dotted all around the country, or even internationally have the added benefit of using least cost routing. For example if there is an office in London and one in Scotland and someone from the London office wants to call an external number in Scotland, the call will first travel over the free data network to the Scottish office and then break out from there to the external number. Therefore the cost to the company would be a local rate rather than national for the call.

Historically, small offices were often "corporate orphans" - their larger office counterparts had feature rich telephone systems but these were cost prohibitive for the smaller offices. This meant that although smaller offices had the same data resources as larger sites, they had different small telephone systems with fewer features and benefits and they were generally not linked to larger sites in any way. This meant that there were different telephones, different or no voicemail and different functionality for the end-users, with several different hardware and management platforms for the business to support.

In the IP world, very small offices or home workers can have IP telephones that are extensions remotely served from an IP telephone system in a larger office.

These elements combine to provide the following three major benefits to the organisation:

• Cost reduction through lower phone bills
• A reduction in the number of hardware platforms they must support
• Identical functionality for all users regardless of location

In the past, home offices with full network connectivity and remote phones were rare and generally only used for personnel on very high salaries. Now, thanks to the explosion of broadband to the home, home workers can be implemented for little more than the cost of an IP phone. Many businesses are now making large estate related cost savings by asking more and more staff to work from home.

Now that VoIP allows sites to be linked in this way far more flexibility is available around the offices. For example, manager/secretary working across the network; a call could be parked on one system and picked up on another system miles away; or three users in three remote offices could be in the same hunt group as a fourth colleague in head office. In essence, IP means that all users in all locations are in effect treated as if they were in the same building using the same telephone system.

Voice over IP allows the telephone to be plugged into the same port as the computer. Therefore if a new office is being built there is no longer a need for businesses to have any separate cabling installed for telephone extensions. One data switch port and one data cabling outlet will run both the phone and the PC. This provides significant cost savings to businesses opening up new offices.

Moves, Adds and Changes (MAC) is one area in which businesses can spend large amounts of time and money on a weekly basis as the organisation evolves - new users arrive, old users leave, people move around the business, desk layouts change. IP can deliver significant improvements to the efficiency of this process, particularly with moves. With IP telephony the user's telephone is simply unplugged from its old location and plugged in at its new location. The IP phone, just like a computer will recognise its new location and continue to work without any re-programming or cabling changes being made.

In traditional telephone system installations, the addition of applications such as voicemail, unified messaging and call centres has involved a considerable investment in hardware. This meant that these types of features were only available to the larger offices with sufficient people benefiting to justify the cost.

VoIP Systems very often have these features built in and customers pay a licence fee per user to activate them. Therefore if there was a small office and only one person wanted to have a voicemail box you are only charged a small, one-off licence fee for that one message box.

Call Centres used to be large costly operations whereas now many smaller businesses are implementing just a few call centre agents to make use of the technology on a much smaller scale. VoIP has made this affordable, as again a single licence fee is required for each user making it possible to have just two people set up as a mini call centre.

The area of new desktop functionality is arguably the most important area of all when one examines the benefits of IP telephony.

Hotdesking for example, allows a user the ability to log on to any hotdesk IP phone and have all their calls, voicemail messages, call forwarding, personal keys etc appear on that phone. Very useful for business who have more staff than phones or have mobile workers that want to share phones.

Now that the phone system is part of the data network, a phone isn't even required. If preferred a headset could be plugged into the PC and calls can be made and answered using softphone software on the computer. Linking voice and data provides a number of spin off benefits to companies, below are examples of the type of applications that are constantly being developed by voice suppliers to improve the value of a telephone system to a customer.

Integration into Outlook is one example, i.e. going into your directory in Outlook and clicking on a persons name allows you to make a call saving you the time of looking them up in the telephone directory and dialling their number. Screen popping facilities can provide you with visibility of a person's details by popping them up on your screen at the same time as your phone rings, often used by call centres in banks, insurance companies and other businesses to speed up the time taken to deal with the call and provide a better image to the customer. Video Calls activated from the phone allow for more interactive communications to take place. It is even possible for people who work in warehouses to update stock records from wireless phones.

The possibilities really are endless and suppliers are heavily reliant on businesses to tell them what would make their lives easier to continue the development of these money and time saving applications for specific market sectors.