There is no longer any doubt about it: the UK has entered a recession. The predicted economic winter increasingly resembles an economic ice-age and SMEs from all sectors are struggling to cope. Now is a time for assessment and retrenchment; for cutting away the superfluous and concentrating on running an efficient business. In the present conditions no expenditure is safe from the critical eye of the CFO or FD and every process or technology needs to prove its value to the business as a whole.Common wisdom holds that there are some technologies you cannot afford to cut costs with. High up on this list is telecommunications. A business telephone system is its life blood – it is how customers are retained and new deals are won. No company can afford to have the quality of its phone system compromised in any way.Traditionally this has caused problems for companies wanting to cut costs. There is no escaping the fact that telephony is expensive. For a start there is a lot of hardware that SMEs need to invest in, from PBXs through to desk-top phones and the fees associated with network installation. OPEX includes not only the costs incurred through telephone usage, but also power consumption. Employees rarely, if ever, turn off their desk phones when leaving the office. Always on standby and waiting to be used, the average desk phone runs idle for an average of 7.6 hours per day – multiply this by the number of phones you have in your company and you have a significant incremental cost.PBX telephony solutions are also, by their nature, technically complex to install and maintain. Typically, most business owners do not have the skills necessary to run a PBX switchboard and so need to employ technical consultants or full-time staff to ensure that the network is set up correctly and runs to the required standard. Needless to say, consultants and employees do not come cheaply, but this has always been deemed a necessary cost.But are these costs really necessary? Obviously it is vital that firms have a telecommunications capability, but how necessary is the desk phone to this? If an employee leaves the office for whatever reason, does that employee suddenly become cut off from the rest of the office just because they are not within reach of their desk phone? Of course not! As soon as the employee leaves the office they immediately turn to their mobile phone and are every bit as contactable as before (provided, of course, they have given their mobile number to all of their customers). This begs the question – why do we need the desk phone at all when employees are always contactable on their mobile phones?For all too long the answer to this question would have been clear and immediate: cost. But this is no longer the case, despite this lingering perception that mobile phones are still too expensive to handle all office phone calls. A recent report by the European Commission found that the average fixed line bill was actually higher than the average monthly prepaid mobile phone package. This is proof again that mobile phones are no longer expensive commodities. The reality is that mobile is now a cost effective office phone alternative and companies are increasingly adopting them as their main form of voice communication, even in the office. The cost of mobile telephony has plummeted and looks set to continue to do so. Now, more than ever, the desk-top phone is looking obsolete. Mobile switchboard solutions are the perfect tonic to the expensive legacy of the PBX approach and a solution ideally suited to these leaner times. ALLmobile telephone systems, such as the one from GoHello, moves the PBX function onto the public Internet. At a stroke, the SME is unburdened of a technically complex and highly expensive piece of equipment. With the PBX virtualised, desk-top phones can be entirely replaced with mobile devices. These can belong to the employee or be the property of the business. Regardless, by logging on to the Internet and spending 10 minutes registering employees’ mobile phone numbers, the SME is enabled with a full business telephone network complete with all the switchboard functions usually associated with fixed-line systems. The cost implications of this are enormous. In terms of CAPEX, no hardware whatsoever is required beyond the mobile phone handsets, already in the possession of employees. Similarly, OPEX is massively reduced. As there are no desk phones, there is one less drain on the electricity bill. More importantly, as the ALLmobile solution can be set up and administered by somebody with only rudimentary computing skills (a basic grasp of the Internet, for example), there is no need to employ skilled technicians to maintain the network – this is all carried out in the ‘cloud’ by service providers such as GoHello. As with desk-phone systems, hosted ALLmobile services allow employee-to-employee calls to be conducted free of charge. The only calls that are charged are to third-party landlines or mobiles and these are charged at the business rates provided by the mobile operator. Often, Mobile Network Operators (MNO) will provide businesses with comprehensive call plans. These include bundles of free minutes in much the same way as with consumer offerings. This means that SMEs need only pay the monthly contract with the MNO – a cost they were already paying – to have all of their telephony needs fulfilled. The only additional cost that SMEs need to pay is to the hosted PBX provider. At GoHello we champion a subscription model which allows our customers to be flexible and scale up their phone systems at no additional cost – just by registering a new phone number online. It is clear, therefore, that for the first time ever, SMEs can look to make cost savings through the modernisation of their telecoms networks. Fixed-line desk phones are outdated and expensive. Such systems in no way benefit businesses anymore, when instead they can cut costs by converging all telephony needs onto the mobile device without losing any of the business functionality they are used to.
WP Autoblogging Plugin
Related posts:
- The Pros and Cons of Using a Virtual Office For one thing, it is extremely cheap to use a...
- Connect, Communicate and Collaborate with Confidence A CEO guide to business transformation through unified communication. A...
- A Few Uses Of Having An IT Service Partner It is a pretty well known fact that when a...
- What Is The Best Way To Combine Remote Desktopping With My Home Landline? I have a complete home network, and i always travel...
- Starting Home Business – Get Online There are many benefits of going online when considering starting...
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
