VOIP Phone System
Like more and more businesses these days, we do not maintain a central office. We spend a lot of time on site with clients and when we are in our 'office(s)' we are geographically spread. At present we use our mobiles as a prime source of communication but the question was recently posed whether a mobile number on the website was off putting to prospects if there was no geographical alternative. Does it 'size us'?
This got us thinking and wondering whether we should invest in a VOIP system that would have as all as extensions from a main hub and have a standard geographic line into it. We could also divert calls to our mobile when out on site. I believe you can host the hub in the Cloud too, which suits our business ethos and removes the cost of a box.
We have looked at an Avaya IP Office solution (www.avaya-ip-office.com) but before we commit to that, I thought I would test the water on Any Answers, as I am sure smaller or more mobile firms of accountants have had a similar dilemma when setting up or considering costs.
Sorry - I've become a bit of a VOIP geek
However, given the cost of BT Line rental nowadays, I suspect my VOIP solution would still compare favourably.
Horses for courses I suppose.
A few questions
A few questions:
- Do you need to record all your calls?
- If you answered YES to the above, do you speak to your clients via your mobile phone?
Swyx is my favourite system. It is a modular system and has a wide variety of options depending on your needs and they have a hosted service as well as an on-premise solution if required.
If you answered yes to the first question, Swyx is the only system I know of which lets you record all your conversations, including those made from your mobile phone!! It is well worth a look at http://www.swyx.com/
If it sounds like Swyx may be of interest, please feel free to contact me.
Roger Neale
Business Systems Consultant
Perkeo Computer Systems Ltd
07714 670789
www.perkeo.co.uk
Another vote for...
Voipfone - we've got it in the office with snom370 phones (also provided by voipfone).
Support is good to help you set things up and reliability is also great - as long as you have internet access.
Voipfone
Echo? No just poor broadband courtesy of BT "automatically adjusting my line to support a stable broadband speed". 4.5mbps to 0.7mbps! Broadband technically anything faster than .6mbps.
New office so that should disappear.
Voipfone is great, easy to use etc. Or if you're feeling really brave download and run your own server using Asterisk.
Thanks to all respondents
Thank you to everyone that has responded.
Some really useful info here and things to follow up.
As with all of these things there are multiple options.
Option 1:
Buy a completely packaged solution that runs proprietary software and is hosted either in one of the partners own home-office or as a virtual 'cloud' solution. For a home-office (for which you'll also need a decent internet connection), expect to pay installation of a couple of thousand pounds as well as substantial monthly costs for hosting / operations. However, these are very flexible and can be tailored to your exact requirements and come bundled with support.
Option 2:
You can host your own SIP server at the address of one of your partners, there are plenty of guys out there who will implement a basic SIP server running Linux (freeware) and Asterisk SIP software (freeware) for about £1,000. However, this means that you need to have hosting space, reasonable bandwidth, contract with a telephone routing provider, etc. Expect to pay either ongoing period (monthly / quarterly or yearly) for support, probably in the range of £250 - £500 depending upon service levels.
Option 3:
The option that we use is to have geographic numbers that can be redirected to a mobile, voicemail or other geographic number.
We use this to operate a Singapore virtual office. From the perspective of our clients out there they have a local number that they can call and this redirects to whomever is covering the office. The office number is permenent, but can be redirected by a 30-second visit to a website.
The facility that we use is http://www.mydivert.com who are based out of the Republic of Ireland. Once you have an account with them plus proof of ID & residence (did ours electronically in 30-minutes), you can pick any geographical location including multiple within the UK (every exchange code I believe) and have a virtual phone number running in a couple of hours.
We rent our virtual number on a month-to-month basis for €7.95 (£7.07 roughly) and have prepaid it until Feb 2012. This gives us lots of flexibility and makes life easier for our clients in Singapore and Malaysia.
The other advantage of this approach is that I can plug a SIP handset into my Laptop and provided that I have software enabled (I use Freeware Linphone) and a reasonable internet connection, I can make and receive phone calls that appear to come from this geographic number without much problem. Billing charges are peanuts (€0.04 for a two-to-three minute phone call being typical).
Also includes voicemail delivered to your e-mail address including Blackberry (sound files are about 60k / minute and very clear quality), plus all sorts of good stuff. We've got a budget of about £200 / year and we're still way in credit.
We got the SIP handsets from Maplin Electronics for £29.99, if implemented appropriately through reduced use of the mobile when working at home or from anywhere with an internet connection it would probably pay for itself.
Win Win for us.
I even have a SIP client connected to the Singapore virtual office running on my Android mobile phone. However, I have to admit that this is more of a gadget than actually useful, since it needs to be connected to a decent wireless hub to give you a connection.
Sort of reminds me of the Rabbit phone (aka DelBoy-style cellphones) from the early 1990's.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_(telecommunications)