Keeping a tight rein on costs is a daily task for almost all small to micro-sized businesses. Every penny spent has to see some tangible benefit or it is vaguely labelled as an overhead. But can any business afford to skimp on its communications?
We can apply crude measures to just about anything to gauge its success or effectiveness. With a web site, this can be total cost versus sales. But what about telephony, that fundamental communication tool that supports a business and its entire scope of operations from sales to customer support and internal communications?
To many eyes, far too much emphasis has been placed on price per minute. With the relentless convergence of mobile and fixed phone networks and, indeed, data, voice and video, it’s highly debatable whether price per minute remains the killer question, the bottom-line immovable object. Now it is a much more wide-ranging question that encompasses total cost of ownership, business benefits, productivity and efficiency, and IT. The phone is no longer just something you talk into. It’s not merely a fixed line A-to-B talk box.
What we have now is not the primitive Alexander Graham Bell-invented sling shot of yesteryear. Today, the phone is a multi-purpose, fully integrated, laser-guided ray-gun blaster that would not be out of place in an Arnold Schwarzenegger sci-fi action movie.
Put another way, maybe the word telephone is outdated and just doesn’t cover it any more. Voice is now, or at least is becoming increasingly, part of a total communications package that takes in internet access, mobile phones, video, instant messaging, email, and web applications. While this may sound slightly removed from the mundane everyday routine of small to micro-sized companies, there are some solid business reasons for divorcing voice from the one-trick pony we know as the telephone.
Firstly, there is the black and white issue of total cost of ownership to consider – the number of lines being used, the costs of buying or renting hardware, the cost of internal calls between different sites and to company mobiles, and whether there is fraudulent or misuse of the system. Significant savings can be made by switching to Voice over IP (VoIP), not least for internal calls but also for local, national and international calls and to mobiles phones too. And being routed over the data network, VoIP enables a whole host of other business benefits in the shape of improved voice services, integration with data systems, better efficiency and productivity, improved customer relationships, and more flexible telecoms management.
The next two years will see an ever bigger volume of small to micro-sized businesses migrating to broadband telephony. This move will be driven in part not just by cost savings but also by demand for new voice services and the increased need for mobility and remote working.
