John Linton
Over the past year or so I have been 'invited' to give a presentation/demonstration of how VoIP can be used by businesses to not just reduce costs but to transform some significant ways they deal with their customers. These one and a half hour events are organised by one of Sydney's larger accounting practices and are held over a business breakfast in the CBD. Normal attendance, excluding the accounting firm's personnel, is around 30 - 40 people and the latest 'invitation' is the 7th I have received since November 2008. I am happy to make this time available because I get a good 'exposure' to why businesses do not use VoIP and I hope I play a small part in dispelling some of the more ridiculous 'myths' that are still around years after the issues disappeared.
I have little doubt that similar VoIP explanatory 'events' are held by all sorts of other professional advisors and hardware and software companies all over Australia every month of the year. I am assuming my 30 or so minute presentation/demonstration is relatively lucid and effective and, possibly, even helpful (I base that on the continuing invitations and the comments by the attendees) but I don't think I have ever changed any attendee's views on VoIP enough for any of them to actually take steps to install a VoIP service within their companies. So I spent some time yesterday looking at the notes I use to make the presentation with a view to improving what I say.
I speak from the point of view of a VoIP user rather than a VoIP seller but I obviously fail to convince anyone who listens to what I say that VoIP is easy to implement and even easier to integrate in to any company's data base and CRM services - although my direct experience over many years in using VoIP, and more recently MOIP to keep in contact with our customers for an increasing number of scenarios shows that to be the case. If I can't do a better job of showing other business managers why and how VOIP can provide very significant operational and financial benefits I think this will be the last time I do this - purely for the benefit of the future attendees who need a better presenter than I am to actually change their minds about VoIP.
I reviewed my notes and changed almost everything in them except the actual VoIP demonstrations. I also reviewed the questionnaire the attendees are asked to fill inĀ but made no changes to the current questions. The main questions have always been:
1) Do you use VoIP in any part of your company at the moment?
2) If not - do you think you will use it
a) within the next 6 months?;
b) the next 12 months?;
c) at some future time - but no plans
d) no likelihood of using VoIP within the next two years?
3) If you aren't going to use VoIP in the near future what best describes your reason(s) not to?
a) Doubts about call quality
b) Doubts about reliability
c) Doubts about in house expertise to install and maintain
d) Already get a lower cost telephone solution from my carrier
e) Have no need/applications that would benefit from VoIP
4) Has this session changed any of your views about VoIP positively?
I have tabulated the answers to these questions for a little over 200 attendees and while well over 90% of attendees answer 'yes' to question 4 (obviously politeness overcomes honesty). Almost 100% cite at least two and up to all 5 of the sub points in question 3 as reasons why they will not consider VoIP in the immediate future.
Telstra and Optus (and all other re-sellers of those carrier's services) have always offered very low cost call charges to large corporate customers and over the past few years call charges for even quite small business customers have continued to decline as Telstra and Optus have tried to maintain their telephone line rental revenue. VoIP hasn't really affected these large customers (as the results of my questionnaire indicate) and call cost savings from using VoIP aren't going to change that as Telstra already offers call charges lower than VoIP to an ever widening demographic. Line Rental charges though are another 'kettle of fish'. I wonder how long it will take for even quite small companies to become aware of what their line rental charges are as a percentage of the office/administration expenses? So I added a fifth question but put it at 1) which is:
1) Are you aware of what your company pays for telephone line rental charges this year compared to last year?
When I look at what Exetel paid for telephone line rental charges up to 9 months ago (even though we made no PSTN/ISDN calls on them) it was a great deal of money in our office operating cost budget - after rental it was the highest cost. I would have thought that most businesses would have wanted to reduce their second highest operating cost if there was an easy way to do it - it appears that VoIP is not regarded as easy by many businesses.