Let’s say that a call from Detroit to Tokyo costs a nice round one dollar per minute. Jim from the Detroit office calls Tim in Tokyo and talks for ten minutes. The total cost of that call is ten dollars. Not so bad, if that ended it right there, but it doesn’t. Jim must call Tim repeatedly throughout the day as orders are made, confirmed, and changed. Even if each call is kept brief, it still adds up and by the end of the day, there have been ten of those ten dollar phone calls for a cost of one hundred dollars.
Real Business Telecommunication
In traditional business model, a staff such as Jim works five days of the week, Monday through Friday, while Tim takes several days off. Because Tim is not there on Tuesday, Jim must re-explain everything to Tim’s replacement, Marc, which takes longer than ten minutes. In fact, it takes nearly fifteen minutes at a cost of fifteen dollars. Again, Jim must call Marc repeatedly, not only to change or firm up details with the first order, but for questions with a whole new days work. By the end of Tuesday, the company has spent over one hundred dollars at the desk of one employee.
If this company has ten employees who are all doing roughly the same thing at their own desks, we are looking at a cost of over one thousand dollars for telecommunications alone. Of course, some of these orders and confirmations could have been done over the Internet with email, but that slows the process down as you wait for responses. Some people do not sit at their desk for the majority of the day, especially in very active offices, so not only do you wait for a response; you often have to wait for your initial email to be read in the first place.
VoIP Savings For Business
The company needs a better way to communicate and still remain competitive and here is where VoIP can save the day. If the company purchases the ATA (analog telephone adaptors) for their ten employees, as well as downloading the correct software they can start making all of these phone calls to Tokyo or wherever in the world for free, saving themselves that one thousand dollars. The company could then funnel that money back into the business or give the ten employees all one hundred dollar bonuses.
Cost Savings On Cell Phones
When they were first revolutionized for widespread use, it looked to the casual observer that the cell phone industry was going to doom the traditional landline based phone companies. While it is true that many people have cut the cord so to speak, others are stuck in dead zones or worse, on the fringes of two competing cell companies’ reaches. Getting a cell phone requires reading and worse, understanding a cell phone plan or using pay as you go. Cell phone plans are unnecessarily difficult to comprehend, and even if you do manage to read through it, there are bound to be details that you miss, which can be very costly to you in the long run. There is also the issue with credit worthiness to get a cell phone, leaving more and more people stuck with the prepaid, or pay as you go option.
Many companies do issue cell phones for their employees, but more and more of them are using the prepaid phones to keep their costs low. There are so many restrictions and rules that the cell phone may not be a smart idea as far as money goes, and there are often issues beyond finances to consider. For instance, what kind of reliability does this service provider give? Will there be places in your town, or even in the building where phones just do not sound right, or worse, end up dropped? Do you really want to risk a high pressure negotiation to your pretty pink cell phone with the Waltzing Matilda ring-tone?
VoIP Cost Saving Model
Even if the initial cost of the ATA or other VoIP equipment is equal to the one thousand dollars originally spent, it would only take a week of free long distance calls for the company to see a steady return on that single investment. To think of the savings on a grander scale think this way: There are 52 weeks in a year. At a cost of $1000 per week, telecommunications costs this company $52,000. A company that is spending that on calls alone had better be raking it in with both fists to stay afloat. Now, that same company spends $1000 to install VoIP equipment and download the software and begins using it that first week. In this equation, the business walks away with a profit of over $50,000 in savings for communication.
Cell phones are great for those employees that are out in the field or in the nearby area and for emergencies. But, they are not reliable enough to replace business lines nor are they economical enough to keep a company on pace to make its projected profit margin for the year. The very fact of their general unpredictable leaves them near the bottom of the list of choices for business uses, but if they are in fact prepaid they may serve as an excellent complement to other parts of the telecommunications chain.