What are you doing with your communications; at work or at home?

What am I trying to do with my communications; at work or at home?

On an ongoing basis, typically monthly, your communications costs are likely to be in the top three if not the top charge. Think about it, you have a home phone, a mobile or two or three in the house (if not more), an internet connection (ADSL or cable), maybe even cable television. That all adds up pretty quickly to a recurring few hundred dollars a month for a typical household.

That’s a fair amount of services just for one house!

What about when you are running a business? For businesses the costs can be from a few hundreds to many tens of thousands of dollars, which is significant, no matter what currency you use. The collection of services used in a business will vary of course to the household in both type and quantity of services. For example, multiple lines for the office staff into a PABX (PBX), data services for internet, email, inter-office communication, mobiles for your mobile field, sales and executive staff.

It’s not that you are just paying for services, there are all sorts of technologies, like mobile phones, computers, email servers, data links, modems, handsets, PABX’s, gateways, servers and all manner of gadgets in between. Even for those working in the IC&T industry it’s bewildering to know everything there is to know about all the possibilities.

In the end it comes down to a simple question.

What am I trying to do with my communications? As a business owner or a householder, the question is valid, just the scale is likely to be different.

You might be wondering, what do you mean by “what am I trying to do with my communications”? Let me answer that briefly by giving some examples.

•    do we mainly receive calls
•    how any SMS text messages do I send a day
•    when I call family, we speak for a long time and they are in Europe
•    I miss more calls than I answer
•    my daughter monopolises the phone
•    we make more calls than we receive
•    the coverage at our place is bad
•    there are more interesting things on the internet and I need to make it more affordable

For businesses the questions are largely those of “what type of business am I in”.

•    we mainly make calls to our clients, usually to their mobiles
•    or internet is great though I would like to get more sales through it
•    how can we make the calls between our offices and staff more cost effective
•    is it time to consider IP telephony yet?

The questions will or should relate to, and not be limited by these considerations:

•    your strategy for the type of business you are in,
•    the volume of your transactions,
•    the value of each transaction,
•    the location,
•    the type of communicating you do during the day, e.g. sales, customer care, support, complaints, general enquires, servicing, surveys;

Knowing the answers to these will help define:

•    technology
•    service type
•    redundancy
•    charges
•    functionality
•    resilience

These are a lot of questions to absorb and begin answering. Just remember a phone is not just a phone, a call is not just a call. There are options, it’s just a matter of weeding through to find the package that’s right for you, at home or in your business.

Doing this right will not only save you money it will also improve the what and the how you are communicating. If you need help with the content…well that’s a different topic 🙂

In the next topic we’ll start looking at discussing one of the most asked questions…

Section 2: Should I get rid of my landline?