Sound cost savings on call packages for businesses
Maria Cappella, managing director of Nildram, explains why businesses should take a closer look at their voice costs as they may be paying more than they think.
At a time when most businesses are looking closely at their costs, there's one area that often gets ignored: voice calls. For a while, this has struck me as being odd. There are more voice providers than ever, all offering cost savings for businesses, whilst trying to reduce BT's stranglehold on the market.
The result is that it has become a very crowded market, which is actually quite confusing for the consumer and for businesses. I was recently speaking to one of our suppliers that is currently using BT for voice services and they had noticed that they were spending hundreds of pounds a year on line rental for eight lines into their office, when they only employed five people. Part of the problem, according to our supplier, was that it's just too much hassle to change and it is perceived as a semi-hidden cost that just appears on the P&L sheet. Not only did our supplier realise that they could save money by dropping lines, but that the tariff they were on was years out of date. They have now decided to take a closer look at their call packages.
VoIP vs analogue
There's a lot of talk about running voice calls over the Internet, commonly called Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). A survey that we ran with IDG found that 8 per cent of Internet users found VoIP to be too confusing. I believe that we need to get away from the debate about the technology – whether it's VoIP or analogue is largely irrelevant. It should be more about cutting the cost of making calls and having a simpler, more transparent billing system: i.e. having phone and broadband on one bill.
At Nildram, we've endeavoured to meet these objectives through our broadband and OfficeTalk packages. When we designed OfficeTalk, we just wanted to make the cost of calling customers and suppliers as cheap as possible. In practice, this means a generous 1,500 minutes of free calls to landlines in office time and very competitive calls to mobile phones, at just 10p a minute to the major network operators. OfficeTalk costs only £10 a month for our broadband customers and £20 for everyone else. And you can have it on the same bill as your broadband.
We're also looking at our own VoIP services. We will not be the first to market in this area, but we're working on how to integrate VoIP with our standard voice service, so that customers get a seamless voice service.
The advantage for businesses will be that they can reduce the costs of multiple PSTN line rentals and benefit from free on-internet phone calls, in addition to the inclusive minute tariffs you have come to expect.
Although we've done our very best to make our voice package simple, you may have been overwhelmed by offers from other suppliers, so it makes sense to do the numbers first. In most cases we're able to make savings for customers.
Whatever you decide, it makes good business sense to look at your voice costs. Poring over phone bills isn't most people's idea of fun, but if you can make some cost savings, it's all worth the effort.
For more information, please visit http://officetalk.nildram.net/