Home Office Telephony

Your Telecom Advisor Press Release

(Thought I'd share my latest press release with you.)

(PORT ST. LUCIE, FL) March 29^th, 2008 – It’s easy for home based businesses in today’s global economy to suffer from image issues. Unfortunately for budding entrepreneurs, consumers often equate bigger with better making it difficult for the average solo-preneur to compete with large corporations. However, it is not only possible for a small business owner to present a bigger, better, and more polished image, it is extremely affordable to do so. This can be done simply by exhibiting a more professional phone presence.

Victoria Santiago, founder of “Your Telecom Advisor”, encourages her clients to study their current telephone image as if they were a potential client making contact for information about their company. “I have found that most home based business owners don’t put much thought into the impression their callers receive when they dial their number,” says Santiago. “On top of that, most hate being interrupted by their ringing telephone, and many feel tied to their desks when expecting an important call. These interruptions can wreak havoc on an already tight schedule, and who wants to sit around waiting for the phone to ring, which may or may not happen when you expect it to?”

For those business owners too busy to thoroughly assess their current image and or research new services that could improve their communications, Santiago offers Phone Image Makeovers. Through a series of consultations, she studies her clients’ existing communication services and provides detailed feedback and recommendations for services.

In addition to her popular phone image makeovers, Santiago has prepared a special report entitled ‘How to Sound Like A Fortune 500 Company Without Spending a Fortune’ which is now available as a free download at her website: www.YourTelecomAdvisor.com. This report explains how implementing a VPBX (Virtual Private Branch eXchange) in your business can improve your image while increasing your efficiency.

For more information, visit http://www.YourTelecomAdvisor.com, call 1-800-377-7454 or Click Here to Email Santiago.

More Quirky Things About VoIP

To continue the never ending saga of my love/hate relationship with VoIP (see my previous post "Things I Hate About Voip") I have yet another complaint. I've been using Voip Your Life for a few months now and I've been pretty happy with their service. However, there is one issue I didn't really expect to have.

I'm always attending webinars and tele-classes to further my knowledge and expertise. A lot of these types of classes happen over teleconference bridges. I recently attended a marketing tele-class and when I dialed into the conference bridge the system started to behave very oddly. It was bringing up menus (ie "press 1 for help" etc), muting me and un-muting me and acting a bit psycho.

What I realized is that the bridge line was translating noise in my VoIP line into commands just as if I had pressed a button. I couldn't hear any noise on the line but the system was obviously picking it up. It doesn't happen with every teleconference bridge but when it does happen it is very annoying.

I ended up ordering the flat rate unlimited long distance plan from my local carrier that I had canceled when I got the VoIP line. I was hoping not to need a back up but it's evident that my bad luck with VoIP continues.

How about those of you who use Voip services, have you had the same experiences? Or am I the only one who's jinxed?

The Cure For The Holiday Hangover: Get Busy!

At the end of each year many business coaches and self-development gurus encourage entrepreneurs to do an assessment of how their business fared that year. Did they reach their revenue goals? Did they control their expenses? Did they keep their promises to their clients?

But, really… during the holidays, who has the time? For the home based business owner the holidays are usually the time of year when it is toughest to separate your business life from your personal life. With visiting relatives, children off from school or daycare and all the social engagements that must be kept it's amazing if we get any work done at all – let alone do things like assessments and goals review.

This is why I prefer to do such things the first week of the year. There is something about the optimism of the new year that makes the sins and foibles of the previous year somehow easier to take. Since the topic of this blog is telecommunications, here are a few items I suggest you check out that may have had a big impact in your communications expenses:

• Check your cell phone plan – Take a look at your cell phone bill. Actually, it is usually best to look at 3 consecutive months since usage can vary greatly from one month to the next. Compare your usage to your included plan minutes. Are you consistently over? Consistently under? Many people assume that when they sign a term contract with the cell provider they are stuck with whatever plan they signed up for. With most carriers that is not typically the case. You can usually upgrade or downgrade your plan without a penalty. If you are consistently going over plan, it might be worth it for you to upgrade to the next level up. Overage minutes tend to be outrageously expensive. The same holds true if you are significantly under plan every month – could you maybe downgrade your plan and save some money?
• Check your home/business line bill – Do you really use all those features you are paying for? Do you need that second line for your business or could you get away with using a virtual pbx plus your home line?
• Check your long distance usage – Are you paying more per minute than you should for long distance calls? How do you know if the rate you are paying is the best out there? Easy. You use one of the many calculators available on the internet. With bill in hand, plug in the number of minutes and the dollar amount and these calculators will calculate how much you are paying and if there are plans out there that could save you money. I use one by Cognigen. Click here to access it: Best Rate Calculator. It is my affiliate link so share the love if you feel so moved.
• For heavy Long Distance Users – Although I've had a love/hate relationship with voip solutions, you can't beat their unlimited plans. There are two things you should do before you look into subscribing to a VOIP service. The first one is to test your broadband connection to make sure your speed can support voip calls. There are many speed checkers out there. I use MySpeed PC VOIP. It's a downloadable application. There are web based ones available out there as well. The second thing you should do is read as many user reviews as you can for the companies you are considering. A couple of really good review sites are VoipReview.org and WhichVoip.Com. If a company continually gets bad reviews from users take heed. If you don't have the right broadband speed or don't want to use Voip, check with your local phone line provider to see if they offer and unlimited LD plan. Most do.

Of course, if you are too busy or would rather not deal with all these details sign up for a Phone Image Makeover and I will make sure you are not paying too much for your telecom services. Click here to request more information about the makeover. Hope you have an amazing 2008!

The Importance of Great Customer Service

In the beginning of this month I wrote a post about the things I hate about VOIP. In it I talked about my disappointment with Ringcentral's Digital Line product. Well, little did I know that my post would be read by Emily Call from Ringcentral. She sent me this very nice e-mail:

Hi Victoria,

I saw your recent post about the challenges of VoIP and in particular, your disappointment with RingCentral's new VoIP service, DigitalLine. Would you be interested in taking a quick meeting with our product support manager to see if we can work out the kinks in your DigitalLine service?

Please let me know a day/time that works for you and I will set up a conference line.

Best,
Emily Call for RingCentral

Now, that scored BIG points in my book. Here is a telecom company that actually cares about what the users are experiencing and want to hear feedback that will help them improve the product.

I took her up on her offer and had a series of phone calls and e-mails with one of their technical gurus. Turns out the reason why my digital line was not working had little to do with their service and a whole lot to do with my bandwidth and pc memory not being sufficient to work with their softphone. They solved that by sending me a pre-configured IP phone which works like a charm. I am thrilled. Calls through the IP phone are clear and crisp – no voice lag, static or echo. I get free calling in the US and Canada and I can have all my incoming calls go through my virtual pbx.

To be fair, Ringcentral's Unlimited Plan is pricier than Vonage or AT&T. They have a promo where you pay $24.99 a month for the first 6 months but then the price goes up to $49.99. However, if you compare all the features you get with their virtual pbx and their outstanding customer service I think it's worth it. If they can continue to impress me in those two fronts I will stay a customer even after the price goes up. To me great service is worth it's weight in gold – especially when it affects my ability to communicate with my clients and prospects.

If you want to learn more about Ringcentral's products and services click here.

Excellent Presentation About Virtual Telephony Services

I have just stumbled upon a webcast that PC Magazine held earlier this year titled: "Reap Big Cost Savings with Virtual Telephony Services". The event was sponsored in part by VirtualPBX and it discusses various telephony technologies for the small business market. The presentation is a little under an hour long but it is well worth your time if you want to learn more about Hosted PBX's, VOIP and other web communications services that can help your business stay connected with clients and prospects. Hope you enjoy it.

Virtual PBX V.S VOIP

Last week I had the pleasure of giving a talk for the Virtual Assistant Revolution organization on the topic of Virtual PBX's. After the presentation portion was over we had a lively discussion about several communications technologies available in the market today including Skype, Vonage and GrandCentral. From the questions I was getting it became apparent that there seems to be some confusion about the differences between Virtual PBX and VOIP technology. This did not surprise me since I had the same confusion when I first learned of them. To make matters worse, service providers that sell VOIP have also begun selling VPBX's and vice-versa further blurring the lines between them.

Here are the main differentiators as I see them:

• How the call is delivered to the end user – Voice Over Internet Protocol or VOIP primarily delivers call traffic – as the name would imply – over the user's broadband internet service. This bypasses the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) which is the network of "hard" lines that come into your physical location. This is why you are able to make free and/or very inexpensive calls using VOIP. The providers don't need to pay the owners of the PSTN to transport their traffic through their network. Usually VOIP providers offer free calls pc to pc (which does not use the PSTN at all) or they charge a small rate for you to initiate the call through VOIP and terminate it to an actual phone (land line or mobile phone).

  Virtual PBX calls are delivered using the PSTN. Here's an example of how VPBX's handle calls: a prospect calls your toll free number. That call first goes to the service provider's servers (their PBX) where, depending upon the answering rules you have set up, will be either terminated in your voicemail or routed to the phone you have designated, which could be your home line or your cell phone. This call is transported through the PSTN.

• Equipment requirements – VPBX services require no additional equipment since the calls are delivered to an actual phone. You access all the features and controls through a web based interface. Some, like Ringcentral, provide a soft phone that you can use to monitor your calls on your computer but that would be the only software required. With VOIP you can also use a soft phone but my experience with such devices has not been the best. The soft phone is vulnerable since it depends solely on your computer to be running smoothly.

  To get the best voice quality you will need to use a separate piece of equipment connected to your dsl or cable modem. Some service providers will give you this equipment for free as an incentive to use their service, some will allow you to buy a pre-configured device at the time you sign up or if you already have a device that is compatible with their service you may use your own device. In either case, if something happens to that piece of equipment your service will be severely affected, sometimes crippled.

• Call cost – As mentioned on item #1, this is where VOIP has a clear advantage over VPBX's. Due to the fact that VOIP is not entirely dependent on the PSTN, service providers can offer their services for little or per minute cost. VPBX service providers typically charge all traffic going through the VPBX – including faxes, voicemails & calls that are forwarded to your phone – by the minute. It is very important that before you decide what service is best for your business you take a close look at your call patterns – not just how many minutes you are using but where you are calling and where your prospects or clients are calling you from.

  Also, when you compare VPBX service providers make sure they don't double bill for calls. I'll explain. Let's say that you have your VPBX set up so that it automatically forwards all your calls to your cell phone. Some providers treat those as two separate calls – the incoming call that was answered by the VPBX and the outgoing call to your cell phone – and they charge accordingly. So for every one minute you spend talking on your phone you'll actually be paying for two minutes. Not all VPBX providers will be forthcoming with that information on their websites so you might need to call them to verify.

All these differences will at some point fade as the technology is moving towards all voice traffic being handled through IP based networks and equipment. Some say the PSTN is dying a slow death. Only time will tell.

If you have any questions about these two technologies feel free to contact me or leave me a comment.

Things I Hate About VOIP

Ahhh! The promise of free calls and how it makes us overlook a multitude of sins… When I first heard about VOIP I thought "What a great idea! I can use my high speed internet to carry my long distance voice conversations and not have to pay per minute anymore." Vonage was the first service I tried out and I was pretty happy with it. Then my router got fried during one of our frequent Florida thunderstorms. I couldn't justify spending the money to purchase another one right away so that was that. Ever since then I have not been overly impressed with VOIP.

Here are the top 5 things I hate about VOIP:

1. The quality of your VOIP service depends solely on the quality and reliability of your broadband connection - As a solo business owner, did you purchase business grade high speed internet? I know I didn't. It was too expensive! I went with residential grade service which works fine but has one major draw-back. It is asynchronous. What does that mean? It means my download speed is lightning fast but my upload speed is quite a bit slower (about 1/10^th the speed of downstream.) Service providers designed residential service that way figuring most home users are more interested in downloading (music, streaming video and files) than they are uploading. Business class service is typically synchronous – same speeds for downloads and uploads. VOIP service works best with synchronous service but who can afford it? Another little known fact is that if there's an outage my cable company does not rush to restore my service. Business grade customers are fixed first and as a "residential customer" I am not the priority. I've had my broadband down for days at a time because of this policy. Can you afford to have your business line down for days?
2. Call quality often stinks – Maybe I'm one of the unlucky ones but I have yet to use a VOIP service that matches the call quality of a regular (POTS) line. Crackling, echoes, static and speech delays are common, not to mention dropped calls. I recently tested Ringcentral's VOIP service and was heartbroken. I so wanted it to work properly because I LOVE their virtual pbx service. Unfortunately it was awful. Many times during a conversation I could hear the other person but they could not hear me. How frustrating! I've had similar problems with Skype but the most annoying was the speech delay. I would be talking and would hear the other person try to say something which actually was a comment they made a few seconds ago about something I said. By the time I tried to reply to that comment she was trying to reply to my last comment from a few seconds ago. It's a mess! Maybe if I had purchased their IP phone instead of using their softphone I wouldn't have had as much of an issue. See Equipment Requirements below.
3. Equipment requirements – Most VOIP services require that you install a device that is connected to your cable or DSL modem. Some service providers will give you the device for free when you sign up for a service contract. Others require that you pay for the device and they can be pricey. Even if you get the device for free under a promotion keep in mind that if it breaks (like it happened to me) you will need to purchase another one to replace it. There are providers who utilize a "softphone" which is software you install on your computer that converts your computer into a telephone. All you need is a PC Headset. Again, you are now dependent on your computer and if it crashes or it is running slow it will render your phone service out of business. Power outages can also leave you without service since no equipment will run without electricity.
4. E911 – In the US, a POTS line will allow you to dial 911 which connects you to your local emergency service (fire, police or EMT). A lot of VOIP carriers (because they are non-local by nature) do not provide 911 services. If you use VOIP services make sure your carrier offers some kind of 911 service. If not, make sure you have a regular line in your home. The last thing you need is to have an accident or a fire and not be able to call for help.
5. Security Issues – Unlike a POTS line which is practically un-hackable (there is no such thing as an 100% secure ANYTHING) VOIP does have some security vulnerabilities that you should be aware of. Read this article for an overview of VOIP security issues: Security Threats in VOIP .

Despite appearances, I am not completely against VOIP. If you are one of the lucky ones who has VOIP and it works for you I think that's great. I'm jealous. I want my FREE calls!