More Hidden Value for VoIP

Voip News

I’ve been citing several examples of hidden value over this series, and have tried to provide a wide variety to show just how different VoIP is from legacy telephony. The longer you use VoIP, the more evident these benefits will become, but conversely, the longer you’ve been using TDM, the less likely you’ll think about telephony in these terms.

A key reason is that legacy telephony has always been independent from everything else, existing in a parallel universe where lack of competition meant that the associated costs never needed justification. Only with the advent of VoIP has there been a reason to challenge the status quo. We’ve been using mobile phones much longer than VoIP has been around, but that mode has never been viewed as a proxy for desk phones. Of course, that’s all changed with the recent explosion of smart phones, but that’s a separate topic.

Coming back to legacy expectations, the big change with VoIP is how telephony – and voice – can now be integrated with all the other communications modes we use every day. Telephony loses some of its exclusivity in this new world, but it opens up new possibilities, such as the hidden value examples I’ve been writing about lately.

Saving Time with VoIP

This may not be the first thing that comes to mind with VoIP, and that’s why so much of the value is “hidden”. Think about what happens when employees miss calls to their desk phone. At minimum, when returning to their desk, an alert tells them that messages await. When time allows, the messages need to be played back and somehow noted for prioritization and follow up. From there, the employee must decide which messages to keep and which to delete. Some messages need to be played back for clarity, and others may just be hang-ups and then the employee may choose to do a call-back to discover who the caller was.

All of these steps take time, and more often than not, the message is just a request to call back, or is relaying information about something you have since taken care of. At this point, exasperation sets in, as the employee realizes yet again that a lot of time has been spent for nothing.

Not all VoIP offerings provide speech-to-text, but it’s certainly a capability that any SMB can use. I’ve already written about visual voicemail, and that alone saves time, not to mention making your life easier. Speech-to-text takes things one step further by providing the text of the message in an email. The accuracy won’t be 100%, but will generally be good enough for everyday needs. Both of these enhanced features of VoIP build on the idea that once telephony is brought into the data environment, you can do a lot of new things that save time and improve productivity.

Saving Money with VoIP

Now, consider that over half of all calls typically end up in voicemail, and all that time lost starts to add up in a big way. You can even quantify the financial impact by assigning an approximate hourly rate to your employees. Let’s just say that rate is $20 an hour, and each employee misses 10 calls a day. If you go on the basis that each message takes three minutes to review and manage, that’s 30 minutes a day, costing you $10 in lost productivity. In a 10 person office, that adds up to $100 a day – or $500 a week – or $2,000 a month, etc. Small things become big things over time, and when thinking about what you’re spending on telephony, that’s a pretty costly waste of time that can largely be eliminated with speech-to-text.

Putting a dollar value on productivity is more of a soft cost, but it’s definitely additive to what you’re going to save with the everyday value VoIP provides. Speech-to-text will either be free or have a nominal cost, but either way, the benefit is undeniable.

Conclusion

If speech-to-text is new to you, I hope you’ll see how this form of hidden value plays to VoIP’s strengths. The key with all these examples of hidden value is to understand how VoIP is different technology-wise, as well as how the utility of voice changes when integrated with other things. Once you start thinking along these lines, these value elements won’t remain hidden for long, and VoIP will be much more than lower cost phone service.

This actually sets the stage for bigger opportunities, and these may also be “hidden” for the time being. I’m talking about things like Unified Communications and IP-based contact center applications, and eventually, I hope they soon fall into your worldview. They truly take your business beyond everyday communications, but you can’t get there until you take the first step by moving to VoIP.

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