Huge Savings On
Business Phone Services

Can VoIP Erase
Business Phone Services
Long Distance Charges?

Ok, so here we are going to be explaining why VoIP is a great choice for your phone services, mainly because it almost totally dodges the local phone company.

Let's start off with reiterating that VoIP generally saves money on your business phone services because you're using your internet pipe to carry your phone calls. Then you're dropping those expensive phone lines with many of the taxes and "per minute" charges like long distance that come with them.

If you're a small business with less than about ten phone lines and still paying per minute charges for long distance - don't. Even basic analog phone service for a small company should be unlimited long distance in this day and age.

However by using VoIP telephone service for our business phone services we can start to not only cap our local and long distance charges with unlimited plans, but also perhaps reduce the costs of a "phone line" by using "metered" usage. This means that local or long distance calls from a low usage location or handset might be pay as you go, reducing our overall costs even more.

We also can use a SIP softphone on our PCs and laptops, especially when travelling; this many times erases long distance charges as well.

A properly deployed VoIP solutions architecture can assist employers to assure employees are working assets long distance. Assuming you're game, employees can skip the commute and spend more time on working if they have the ability to do it virtually, either from home or on the road.

If properly configured a VoIP solutions architecture can also let us do fax over IP, allowing us to save and cap long distance charges here as well.

Here's a handy little "VoIP best rates" finder to find the best plans for your personal or business needs. Click here to jump to the rate finder.

Use VoIP To Increase Employee Productivity

See the pages on these items, as they can greatly enhance employee productivity and customer service opportunities for your business:

Faxing Over VoIP

VoIP Unified Communications

Cloud Computing

VoIP Solutions Architecture

VoIP Conference Software

Working Assets Long Distance

IVR Technologies

It's Important To Use A Quality Provider

A note of common sense here to understand the nature of "free" offerings. Nothing of quality is ever free, especially in the business phone services arena where we are looking for crystal clear, toll quality voice calls.

You'll see it in many articles on my website – you get what you pay for!

Hooking your small business phone system into a cheap, low quality VoIP telephone service is only going to hurt the perception of your firm in the eyes of your customers, vendors and especially employees.

Nothing is more aggravating to an employee or customer than unintelligible and dropped phone calls while they are trying to do business. See my
VoIP problems page for an outline of these issues.

Still have questions on the VoIP best business phone services for your company? Avoid costly mistakes, click here to send me a note, I can help you choose the best VoIP provider

Only Need A Line Or Two?

My hand picked 1 or 2 line business VoIP phone service is at the banner below, tell them E-Dude sent you!

Pssstt… I'll let you in
on Dirty Little Secret

As of this writing in late 2009, ALL telephone calls that involve a landline phone cost money, even if initiated from a VoIP phone service. This is because somebody is paying for the access and VoIP termination, of each and every call.

Why? Because the big boys A.K.A. Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers (ILECs) have to get something for switching thru your calls to the network and wires they generally own. The law says they get paid to transport the call to the destination in their area of operations.

So you see a phone call CANNOT be totally free unless it's VoIP to VoIP (which is happening a lot in the residential area with Skype and others, but not in the SMB market much yet, unless you're willing to call PC to PC).

Larger business are calling branch to branch over their Wide Area Network or the internet, but spending plenty to set it all up initially, but in the end the calls are "free" if you want to call it that <;-)

With that said there are opportunities with certain providers to call branch to branch or even to other businesses also using that provider's network "for free". Note this is generally using VoIP on the providers own network (a great way to go) see my VoIP phone service provider page for more on this.

So in the end, the best we can hope to do is decrease the existing cost of our voice lines, and perhaps cap our Long Distance charges by getting an "unlimited" plan. Of course with business VoIP phone service we will also be gaining a rich set of features and functionality, much of which we didn't have previously.

Why Small Businesses Pay More
For Business Phone Services

Let me share with you that because small and mid size businesses don't have the buying power of the big boys, they generally pay more incrementally. Many times business phone services bundles are pushed on the SMB market that results in perceived value during the sales process, but is never realized for whatever reason.

Good examples of this are phone lines that are "less expensive" if purchased with DSL, calling features, shared hosting or e-mail options. Technically these additional features are available to the customer, but may never be utilized.

Additionally SMBs tend not to have the dedicated purchasing managers and staff to audit business phone services billings, and hence might go on for months or even years paying more than agreed or contracted prices.

Heck, I had a recent customer come to me who had over paid their phone bill by 25% each and every month for 24 months compared to what had been promised by their contract. When we went to the provider and requested a refund, they pointed to the contract that said they only had to return the last 90 days of overage!

If you'd like to have an audit done, click here and I will hook you up with a great opportunity. These types of firms generally work on a percentage of the money saved, so are a great place to start if you're not making the move to VoIP telephone service right now.

It's All About Incremental Income
To Your Local Phone Company

So we must understand the AT&Ts of the world are all about incremental income. If they are charging you some obscure fee or charge that goes unnoticed or unchallenged, this is multiplied by a zillion (well maybe not a zillion…) other customers and results in a whole lot of money to them. A buck or a few cents here and there isn't a big deal to you and me, but its big incremental income to the carriers.

So our goal in using VoIP for our business phone services is to not only cap the cost of our small business phone service, perhaps even on an unlimited use basis, but to also simplify the overall billing, deployment and usage of the technology.

We take back control of certain charges by using our internet access (a fixed cost) to place and receive phone calls. In fact many times we can buy an IP business phone system PBX, or do hosted PBX and have a simple per user or per line charge that includes everything, taxes, usage charges, features and so forth.

They Won't Tell You When There's A Better Deal

So here we have another large phone company philosophy, mainly that unless you're asking them for a better deal, they won't tell you if one exists.

By making the move to VoIP business phone services we essentially lock in the best deal up front, many times with providers that will continue to allow us to modify our plans and features as needed, hopefully through a web interface, sometimes even proactively based on usage or number of users, etc.

VoIP telephone service is generally much less expensive anyway when properly designed for your business, so we're saving money now and in the future as well.

Add in the increased Return On Investment (ROI) realized with the concepts of a VoIP Solutions Architecture that leverages fax over IP, voicemail to e-mail, VoIP Unified Communications and cloud computing and you have a real winner!

Use this "VoIP best rates" finder to find the best plans for your personal or SOHO business needs. Click here to jump to the rate finder.If you need more than 10 lines, call me for the "Real McCoy"

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