The Office in Your Hip Pocket

It’s high time you review your phone service and look at ways to shave dollars off a growing monthly bill.

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After your truck, the telephone is probably your most valuable business tool. It connects you to customers and employees, but it can also be a problem. There is that big monthly bill running on page after page, on top of all the phone options that have sprung up in recent years. It’s enough to confuse the most savvy small business office manager, so let’s walk through some ideas, and perhaps you’ll gain a better understanding of your needs and tighter control over your costs.

Your office phones may still be connected to landlines. There’s nothing wrong with that. You’re getting the best call quality possible, but while you and your customers may appreciate understanding one another clearly, you may not be getting the best bang for your buck. With cell-phone-only households on the rise (36 percent of the market in June 2012), the cost of maintaining all those miles of wire is spread over a shrinking customer base. So when you look at your bill, consider what pricey services you may not need.

If you don’t need long-distance connections to reach customers, why not drop that portion of your service? You undoubtedly have a cellphone. Could you use that for the occasional long-distance call to a vendor? Also, are you paying for extra lines that you ordered at one time but no longer need? If you have a complicated operation with a lot of people and a complex phone bill, think about hiring a professional telecommunications consultant to perform an audit. Among consultants it is a given that if there are bills, there are errors in them.

To VOIP or not to VOIP

One way to have decent call quality without the high cost of a landline is to use VOIP service. This is an acronym for Voice Over Internet Protocol. Using an adapter or special phone, calls are sent through your Internet service provider rather than the phone company. You are required to have high-speed Internet service because audio calls contain a lot of information that must be transmitted quickly for the audio to sound smooth.

VOIP services can cost as little as $10 a month for unlimited calls to the U.S. and Canada, but there may be extra charges to connect to cellphones. On the downside, you are dependent on the Internet. If it’s down, so is your office phone. If there’s a heavy load on your network — from online games for example — your VOIP call may sound choppy. Still, the voice quality can be better than cellphone reception.

That brings us to cellphones, one of the game-changing business tools of the past generation. The key to controlling cellphone costs is to be careful about assessing your needs and your plan. A pool of shared minutes may serve your business well because it will average out across employees who don’t talk much and those who do.

You may also find advantages in selecting one type of phone over another. The old flip phones are no longer considered cool, but they still have a place. They’re cheap and easily replaced if one falls into a tank or is dropped on a concrete sidewalk at a work site. And they’re not fussy. Open it. Dial. It works all the time.

How smart?

At the same time, touch-screen smartphones offer amazing flexibility. They can act as GPS units to guide a technician to a new customer. Instead of disturbing your technician with a call, your office assistant can send a text or email if there’s a change of plan. The phone can hold documents, such as the instructions for servicing or installing a new product. And the phone can be used to take and email pictures, allowing your technician to consult with you about unusual problems.

If your phone and service provider allow for live video, you could provide this consultation in real time. These things help you serve customers faster and more efficiently, but they come at a price.

Cellphone companies have discovered consumers are making much more use of data services than voice services, and those providers are revising phone plans accordingly. Here again, a shared pool of data — typically measured in gigabytes per month — may allow you to equalize usage among employees, yet not pay for data capacity you won’t use. Be careful in estimating this because overage charges can be heavy. Exceeding a low data limit once or twice in a year may be acceptable if the annual savings are greater, but regular overage fees can quickly build.

Your bill lists data use, but it will be a list of numbers, day by day. Check your phone company’s website. Typically you can look at a more easily understood graph of your data-use history.

Partner with employees

One concern with smartphone use is the charges incurred when employees use them for personal entertainment. Watching a live video or listening to a few songs over the Internet will quickly eat up your monthly data allowance. One way around this is to allow your employees to use their own smartphones while you provide a fixed monthly payment to them for business use. This way employees shoulder the responsibility for overage charges or replacement of an expensive electronic device if it’s damaged on the job site.

You can switch your business to cellphone-use only. If you live in an area with very good reception and customers accustomed to the sometimes uneven sound quality of cellphones, you may be able to save a good deal of money. And your business is always in your pocket. For a one- or two-person operation, this may be especially cost-effective. Just make sure to record a business greeting for your phone’s voice mail, answer in a professional manner, and if you don’t have time to talk, don’t answer. A customer will take more kindly to voice mail than being put off as unimportant.



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