“The Cloud” has been all over the news and media in ever more frequent stories. There is even a new comedy coming out called “Sex Tape” where the premise is a couples home movie ends up in “the cloud” but few “regular” users seem to actually understand what it is. We are seeing news almost daily about the various big cloud storage platforms like Box, Dropbox, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc., either going public, adding storage, reducing costs, going public, acquiring another company, also etc.. So what is this all about you might (or might not) ask?
For most of us the cloud is used for storage and backup of our smartphones and tablets. This is what gives you some measure of safety when your phone drops in the toilet by accident. Another aspect of this is being able to work on documents easily across devices like Microsoft OneNote, and also share them like Google Drive, Dropbox, Box or a hybrid solution like Egnyte. Many of the websites you visit are probably being hosted in Amazon’s Elastic Cloud service.
The cloud is giving us a global computing platform that can revolutionize a market segment overnight. Some real major advantages is the ability to scale, massively, very quickly, like within hours, and not incur massive hardware costs, ordering lead times, installation and setup time. There is a lot going on in the manufacturing and scientific sectors, but I was interested in more business oriented, general purpose applications. I work with a lot of small companies, startups, sole proprietors and such, most of which cannot afford an IT department and are themselves busy with the business of growing their business, something that they are expert in, so they rely on people like me to help them find cost effective and easy to use solutions.
My clients are the best source for these pieces because they drive the real world need, and give me an opportunity to go through the research process to solve a specific problem as opposed to just reading up on things to satisfy my intellectual curiosity. In this case I have a small company, driven by one person, the other few are support staff to manage calls and files.
If you’re phone’s still attached to your wall, you’re crazy
They make use of the cloud for file sharing as they are all in different locations, but they do a lot of client calls and conference calls and the need to be able to have some sort of phone system to replace the hodgepodge of solutions they are currently using. So I went in search of a cloud based phone system that was reliable and not one of the systems that had a confusing array of hardware and software requirements.
Phone systems are expensive to buy, setup, support and maintain, so they are ripe for solutions that can solve this problem for you. My research led to a number of solution providers, all with different pricing plans and features and functions. One that caught my eye was Telebroad, and they can serve as a good example of the kinds of features that you can or should look for in a solution. This isn’t meant to be a comparative review of products, but using one vendor as an example. With that, here are some of the things I found with the Telebroad PBXcellent system.
Scalability: You can go from 1 to 1000 phone lines without having to run a single new phone cable.
Portable: Since it is a VoIP system, you can login to it from anywhere that you have an internet connection and people can reach you at your regular extension without knowing you’re not at the office and without doing any complex forwarding functions.
Reliability: Since you’re relying on a cloud system, they have much more of a vested interest in uptime than you are since they have lots and lots of customers using that same service. In this case Telebroad says they have failover capability, so even if the main cloud goes down (which has happened with all the big ones in the last year or so, Amazon, Microsoft and Google), you should still be up.
Integration: They have an Outlook plugin that can be used as a dialer and also for caller ID. The have a Google Chrome plug in that will make phone numbers on web pages in to active links so you can click on them and have the system call for you. In addition, they work with all the major CRM systems, such as Salesforce.
Call Center: This means you can handle advanced hold, forwarding, messaging and call recording capability. Teleboard even has an interface where you can visually see the calls on hold and drag/drop them between extensions. I’m not sure if they have this function, but intelligent routing between queues that would dynamically change who you are waiting on to provide the shortest possible hold time would be a great feature.
Call types: You have your standard direct call, also 3-way and conference calling functions. Pretty much anything you’d normally expect.
Reporting: Always a good thing to gauge metrics of calls, missed calls, dropped calls, average wait times, calls per agent, etc. Pretty much anything you want that will allow you to fine tune your center, if that is an issue for your business.
Faxing: It is surprising we still have to fax, but it’s true. Being able to send/receive both paper and paperless faxing is an advantage that you don’t want to overlook. I still have to fax about once a month.
There are a ton more details in there, but suffice to say, the feature set that is available is something that will have you totally satisfied. Your only limitation is going to be the internet pipe you are working with at your home or office that you are deploying this with. The cost seemed pretty reasonable. For Teleboard, they can customize whatever you’re looking for, but one of their low end systems with four extensions was just $129 a month. I saw some competitors that were strictly a per line, per month cost for as little as $8 a month per line, but that had various limitations on it.
I gotta say, I’m really happy with how this market segment is growing, I can see it easily supplanting most or all of the current phone infrastructure we have between IP and cell-based phones. I’m sure there is even more cloud based technology that someone is dreaming up as I write this that will change the world again, before we know it.
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