Why? Because you have more people on the telephone, of course. That’s the obvious answer, but it may be so obvious that you don’t look further. The fact is that not all telephone charges are created equal. Some are difficult to avoid and a necessary part of doing business. Others can be eliminated through the use of better technology. The technology that works this magic is called unified communications. Let’s take a look at a quick animation that explains everything...
Here are some important points made in the video and how they apply to you. Unified communications is all about merging your voice, data and video networks into one unified network. Many businesses can save money by doing this, even if they are smaller companies and even if they have only one location. Not mentioned is the hosted PBX solution that works especially well for smaller companies that don’t have a large IT staff.
The real cost cutting comes from consolidating the communications across multiple business locations. Some companies grow linearly with optimization every step of the way. Most don’t. If any of your growth has been from mergers and acquisitions, you can be pretty certain that your telephone network is not anywhere close to optimized. That’s probably true to some extent even if all you’ve done is add branch offices.
Why? Because the tendency is to have a phone system at each location. That means a stand-along PBX with trunks to the local phone company and different bills from different providers at each location. Then there’s the matter of communication among locations and back to headquarters. Chances are that this is done by making long distance phone calls and incurring long distance phone charges. Ding-ding-ding. You can just hear those telcos ringing the registers.
What’s better optimized? Moving your voice communications, i.e. telephone calls, from their own individual networks to your main corporate network that interconnects all locations. You need it for data anyway. Why not let voice packets piggyback on the same network?
What happens with this arrangement is that all your internal calls are free of charge. The phone company can’t charge you if you don’t use their network. So, stay off the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) until you absolutely have to use it. That’s for outside calls to other companies or your own customers.
By letting a major competitive carrier, like Level 3, be your network and phone service provider, you can get by with a single IP PBX located somewhere on the network to route outside calls through one set of PSTN trunk lines. Level 3 has the advantage of being licensed as a competitive phone company in all 50 states, so they can get you local numbers wherever you want to establish a presence.
Is it really possible to save 50% of your phone bill by using unified communications? It can be that lucrative. How much can your operation save? Get competitive quotes for unified communications SIP trunking for all your business locations and see just how far your eyes bug out at the answer.
