With so many of us working from home it's imperative that we continue to remain vigilant and cyber-secure. Our clients have asked us to provide some basic steps we can take to protect ourselves while we work from home during the Covid-19 pandemic

Call Accounting:

Ever wonder why your customers complain that they are having a hard time reaching you? Maybe you lost a key customer or prospect because a phone call or voicemail wasn't returned? Call Accounting software or applications can track all of your calls from "cradle to grave" meaning that you can visually track a call from the point that it hit your phone system through the hang-up. Did it get to an extension? If so, which extension? Was a message left in the voicemail box? How long was the message? All of these questions can be answered with Call Accounting.

In the current technology world it seems that everything is "moving to the cloud". On a commercial level, many key business tools such as Microsoft Office have become cloud-based (Office 365). On a personal level, our iPhone and Android music, pictures and videos are saved and backed-up to the cloud. So what is "the cloud" anyway?

The Cloud is a really just a collection of data centers. A data center is made up of racks of data servers nestled inside a secure, always powered, always connected, disaster-resistant building. They come in many shapes and sizes from the 1.3 Million square foot Citadel in Reno, to a room tucked away in a multi-use office building. By this broad definition, there are three million data centers in the US. That's one (1) data center for every 100 people. Google by itself owns eight (8) data centers around the world. With the increasing need for connectivity and the growing importance of data we will see an additional 4,000 more data centers built in the US in the next 2 years. So how does business technology and more specifically, voice communications take advantage of the cloud?

In our third and last post discussing Unified Communications we will focus on Mobility technology and its role in bringing the mobile work force closer by providing quicker and more efficient interaction with customers and co-workers. Mobility refers to any application developed for a mobile device that facilitates business outside of a typical office environment. The improved screen size and power of mobile devices coupled with the ongoing movement of employees outside the office has created a need for better communications using their mobile devices.

As discussed in the first post of this series highlighting Unified Communications (UC), the role of UC is to bring the mobile work force closer by providing quicker and more efficient interaction with customers and co-workers. One important component of UC is Presence. Presence is an application that provides a bird’s eye view of the whereabouts of colleagues – providing real-time information on staff availability, regardless of location.  Are they in a meeting, on vacation, on sick leave?  Presence makes it possible to find and contact an available co-worker wherever they might be, enabling as close to a "real-time" response to customers as possible .

There is no question that technology has improved the way that business people communicate. However, with more employees working from home or the road and corporate footprints expanding, new challenges to communication with customers and colleagues have emerged.  At the same time, even with an increasing number of millennials in the work force, interpersonal communication is as important as it has ever been.  So how does technology help meet the need for timely and personalized communication while remaining mindful of the travel budget?  Using features found within Unified Communications, or "UC" for short, is one answer and a broad-ranging topic that we will explore more in depth in subsequent blog posts. Our focus today is on an important component of Unified Communications; audio and video Conferencing.    

Today, the mere mention of a fax machine often leads to a chuckle. Remember the horrible grating sounds the machine made while pushing out documents printed on flimsy, filmy facsimile paper? This bygone technology was actually used to transmit documents and has all but been replaced by email.  In fact, The Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. has entered a fax machine as part of its historical artifacts exhibit. True Story. 

While most of us feel that the fax machine has gone the way of the VCR (wow - we are really dating ourselves with this post), in reality there are still industries that require documents to be transmitted via fax. Heavily regulated industries such as healthcare, government and law firms still require documents to be sent this way. The fact that these archaic standards still persist can be attributed partly to the rise of cyber-crime but also to the continuing requirements for a genuine signature.  While document transfer technology is progressing along with industry standards, some of these sectors like the Internal Revenue Service may never completely do away with the fax. 

Hello? Is anyone there? You've just been put on hold (you think!) but all you hear is silence. Are you being transferred? Are you still connected? Will anyone return to take your call? This scenario is fairly common and not only bad customer service, but also a missed opportunity. In today's world, there is no excuse for this. Why not provide music combined with a message that will let your caller know they are important to you?

Even better, why not take the opportunity to let the caller know what your company is about and let them know about your products and services or tell them about special programs or company initiatives?

If you have ever paid a phone/internet bill, you have undoubtedly noticed the long list of additional fees and charges.  Most of us just grit our teeth and pay, without a good understanding of why they are there in the first place.  Today we will provide a closer look at these charges.  After all, they account for approximately 20% to 30% of our monthly bill!  Are they all required local, state and federal taxes, or are some "tacked" on at the discretion of the carrier? We will begin by breaking down the surcharges and fees and then we will point out a few areas of costs savings you might realize with a more careful analysis of your phone and internet bills.

There is no doubt that the world is getting smaller, maybe not in size, but certainly in terms of global reach. With the increasing reach of the internet we can connect to anyone in the world with a simple mouse-click.

Fun Fact: In December 1995 the internet was connected via 16 million users (roughly .4% of the world's population). In December of 2017 4.156 Billion users were connected - That's 54% of the world!

Today an ever-increasing amount of phone calls travel over the internet and with the cost of sending voice as data so low, more people are getting "free" calling to more places around the globe every day. So what is the story with Business Long Distance rates?