The unity*dc B2B marketing blog: Business
Internet (VOIP) phones in a busy office
Wed, 13th Aug 2008
At an event I was at today a chap gave a talk about voice over IP phone phones and I thought I'd share our experiences with VOIP in our business.
We've been using a mixture of VOIP and traditional phones for about 6 months here now and we've learnt that there are some definite Pros and Cons. VOIP providers seem to promise an awful lot: cheap or free calls, fancy PBX features like conference calling and hunt groups (more about these terms later) and lots of flexibility.
The chap giving the talk today said that the main downfall of VOIP right now is the reliability isn't yet quite up with the reliability that you get from water or mains power. This tallies well with our experience - setting things up is still a bit like internet connectivity used to be with dial-up or before BT brought in their Homehubs: you need to know what you're doing with all the settings or have someone really techy on hand who does know or your phone will be flaky.
Because most of our people work remotely, we opted for a hosted VOIP solution, where the hosting people run the VOIP server in their data centre. We looked at various providers and chose Gradwell.com as they seemed best set up for our kind of business and responded well when we had problems setting-up. We chose their hosted PBX service, which they call Centrex. Gradwell's Centrex is reasonably easy to set-up and manage so long as you've learnt the phone terminology first. They have an extranet where you can manage anything you would do with a normal office phone system - hunt groups, time of day routing, voicemail, IVR menus, the lot. If this all sounds double-dutch to you, it did to us too - but persevere, I'll explain what it all means below.
The pros
We like our VOIP system because it is flexible and enables us to handle incoming calls efficiently no matter where our staff are - in the office or at home or even out-and-about. We're saving about 30-40% on our outgoing calls as all calls to geographic numbers are free with our package.
The cons
The biggest problem with VOIP is that it is totally dependent on your Internet connection. Unless you're watching the Olympics on the Internet it's unlikely that you'll notice when your connection is a bit slow or there's a bit of what techies call "latency." However, either of these things can make talking to someone over VOIP a real pain, with breaks in the speech or a nasty echo being the main symptoms. In our office we're dependent upon Regus for our connectivity so this has been a bit hit-and-miss on occasion. Thankfully we have a normal phone line as backup so we route all incoming calls to that.
Conclusion
In conclusion I'd say if you have a good IT partner that you trust to help you with your office computers and network then get them to help you with your VOIP. Unless you've got more than one office or you make a lot of international calls, you're unlikely to see a dramatic drop in costs from VOIP, but it will make you more flexible, especially for inbound calls. Over 95% of calls we receive get to a human being within 5 rings and this works well for us.
What the terminology means
PBXes are the boxes you'd have in your office somewhere to run your internal phone network. With VOIP, these are now bits of software that run on a server in your server rack/room or you can even buy a hosted service with no equipment needed, which is what we do.
Handsets are the physical phones you talk on. These look and work just like ordinary phones but cost a little bit more and they plug into your office network rather than the phone line. However, there are some that also plug into the phone line too, for a backup.
Hunt groups these are probably the best bit about PBXes. When a call comes in you can have it ring any combination of handsets so the person calling you gets to a human being as quickly as possible. We have ours set to go to the Regus receptionist first, but if she doesn't pick up in 5 rings, then all the handsets in the office ring at once.
Time of day routing this means that you can set different rules for your hunt groups etc, depending on if it's a weekday or after hours etc. The Regus receptionist goes home at 5.30 so after then incoming callers go straight to our office handsets.
IVR menus these are those annoying "press 1 for support" type menus. We don't tend to use them, preferring voicemail instead if the office is closed.