Do your staff think about the cost of communication to your business?

Business cannot survive without prompt, effective communication.

Technology provides so many tools for communication, and not all are expensive.
When the telephone was invented it was predicted that it would be totally ineffective and would never gain popularity.
Telecommunications is a multi-billion dollar industry and remains one of the main modes of communication both in the business and personal realm.
The humble phone has come a long way and large businesses have efficient systems allowing for multiple lines, free internal calls, cordless handsets, hands free, conference calls, video conferencing and the mobile phone.
Small businesses spend the larger percentage on communication via telephone.
VOIP is one way of reducing the phone bill, but there are other ways to use technology to reduce your communications costs.
Online tools can facilitate effective communication with a little practice.
Instant messaging for example is an effective tool.  There are many free instant messaging programs and some allow you to communicate with many instant messaging programs helping to cover what everyone uses.   Most allow you to do more than just talk with text, many include voice capabilities.
Virtual offices are brilliant tools allowing for video conferencing, file and application sharing, whiteboards and voice capabilities.
The cost effectiveness is significant as each time you use the room you are only using your internet connection.
Meeting with staff, suppliers or clients across a distance can be effectively held without travel expenses and travel time.  This means meetings can be for minutes or hours and as frequent as needed.
It has become too easy to just pick up a phone and maybe pay dearly when there could be so many other ways to communicate even more effectively.  The more effectively you communicate, the more your business will grow.

Don’t mistakenly think of these as something that kids mess
about with, these are genuine business tools.

VOIP has been gaining popularity over the past 5 years both in the home and office.

I’ve been using VOIP for over a year now and am impressed immensely every month with the cost benefits.  Well once I had convinced my last teenager left at home that if he was going to use it to make $70 - 80 worth of calls per month to mobiles he could pay for them.

Now my monthly phone bill is down to under $20 instead of around $90 and I make at least double the number of phone calls.

Why do I make double the calls?

Because it costs me nothing to make them so rather than my kids or friends who live a distance away paying for contact I make the calls.

The quality has been an issue for me at times I will openly admit that.   BUT the reduction in the price has more than made up for it in my books and in fact I have found that the quality of sound is better for me and I am a little hard of hearing nowadays.

In fact I bought new cordless phones about one month ago and am really dissapointed in them as they echo a little and the quality of voice has dropped again, so I’m considering ditching them.

OK I’m going to basically now provide a swag of links to more VOIP information and providers.

BITTS can assist in signing you up for VOIP and putting the hardware in place.

Simply email les [at] bitts4learning.com.au (replay [at] with @ )and enquire about our VOIP assistance services.

LINKS

Australian VOIP Guide

VOIP Australia site

VOIP Choice

Beyond Logic Article

Engin - an Austrlian VOIP provider

Wikipedia article on VOIP

I hope these links give you a good coverage of VOIP and assist you in your decision to save some money on running your business.

Voice-over-internet-protocol or VOIP is widely used to allow you to transmit your voice through the internet (make a phone call).  This means you can use regular telephone networks through any internet service provider.
What this particularly means for your business is no charges on long distance calls.
The cost savings are huge and even the setup costs are minimal.
By 1973 voice was actually being transmitted over the early internet and the technology has been available since the early 1980s.
The original VOIP packages had many features but only allowed users to speak to other VOIP users using software phones on their computers.
In 1997 a new level of technology brought in the soft-switch designed to replace hardware telephone switches and act as a gateway between large networks.
Today VOIP hardware can be added to your network but most commonly is integrate in the modem.
The ability to transmit more than one telephone call over the same connection gives a simple way to add extra telephone lines to an office.  Conference calling and many other features that you normally pay more for are mostly zero cost.
Secure calls can be made and integrated with other services such as video conversation and data file exchanges.
The main issues faced by business in this area are likely to be that some broadband connections may have less quality and cause momentary voice drop-out.  This is usually noticed on highly congested networks or a network with long distances between end points.
Basically there are still two main ways to use VOIP – using a software-based phone on a computer or using hardware adaptor to connect analogue and digital phones.  Using a software phone is a cheap alternative to purchasing new hardware but limits the caller to a single point of calling.
Many Instant Messaging programs also now include a voice capability using VOIP technology but referred to as VOIM

URL’s or web addresses follow a logical pattern and so do email addresses.  It is very easy to tell if it is an email or web address.
Email works through a system of post offices that direct your mail around the world to the intended recipient, though it is more similar to owning a post office box than having mail delivered to a street address.
The actual email address has 2 major sections to it.
Firstly the section before the @ sign indicates who the email is addressed to.
This could be a name such as Katrina, a position such as manager or any word the owner of the address chooses.
The second section is the domain where the mail is hosted.  We examined how web addresses and domains are patterned last week and this is exactly the same in the second section of an email address.
The @ sign literally means ‘at’.
So when you send an email to katrina@bitts4learning.com you are literally sending an email to the person Katrina whose post office is hosted at bitts4learning.com.
Your email program or web email service looks only at the second part of the email address and sends an email you have written to that address.  When the host receives that email it looks only at the first section to see which email mailbox owns that name and puts the mail in that box.
When you open the email program on your computer you have set it up to hold the key to your mailbox and the program pops down to your post office and collects your mail for you.
If you use web-based email (such as gmail) you go to the post office and open your mailbox with your key (password)
You can always tell an email address from a web address as email addresses always have an @ in them and web addresses never do.