Being a part of a start up company I’ve become trained to watch costs at all times even considering we’re very well funded. We currently have a small office space and have our phone service through Cablevision here in Connecticut. I’m not really going to get into how horrible our service has been but outgoing calls rarely result in hearing the person I’m supposed to be speaking with on the other end. When managing a sales team, let alone a company, you’re going to be on the phone often to say the least. How about we find a more reliable service and one that cuts costs at the same time? Skype sounds good!

Today we began some research on Skype as a solution to our existing phone service woes. Skype, the software program that allows you to make calls over the internet seems ideal for a small business environment not to mention their amazing costs even for personal use. More and more I’m finding that people aren’t using house phones and rely more on their mobile phone as their primary phone. I myself am one of these people yet I’m also on my computer very often, especially at work. Skype creates a great bond between your phone habits and your computer use.

As I did research, I was amazed at the flexibility Skype offers. Finding contacts is extremely simple…just enter their name or email address and it locates them if they are utilizing the service. It can pull contacts from your existing address book as well.

As an example, I did a search for others with my name. It found a few others including myself that I can add to my contacts to have free chat’s with.

Free video conferencing is available with Skype. If you’ve ever used iChat’s video chat, you’ll notice its very similar. The great thing about Skype is that those you wish to call are not required to be Skype members to contact them. Skype allows you to call or SMS any number, landline or mobile.

In order to call non skype numbers you do need to pay but a very limited fee. You can sign up in the US and Canada for $2.95 a month which includes unlimited calls! You can also add credits to your account if you wish to do. To test the quality of a call we added a few credits and made a call to one of our clients and it was just as clear as a normal phone utilizing the internal microphone on our MacBook Pro’s. We even asked our client if they could here us clearly…NO PROBLEMS!

The flexibility continues! Look at some of the things you can do with your Skype Account.

As I mentioned there are some features that are free and others that do require payment but they are extremely affordable. To put it in perspective our current phone service bill in our office is upwards of a couple hundred bucks then you tack on the internet etc. Obviously the internet is required but the numerous phone lines become costly. I could only imagine a larger company! Not even considering the business plan, we could each get a monthly plan of $2.95. Multiply that by the 8 people in our CT office, $23.60 a month. Are you laughing, because I am!

That is just ridiculous to me! Hundreds of dollars will be saved when we make this transition, let alone I doubt we’ll notice much of a difference. Just because I was curious, I asked one of my publishers that I know utilized Skype very heavily and they had nothing but good things to say. When he is out of the office, he has the Skype account forward calls to his mobile phone. When he is in the office all calls go directly through Skype to his computer.

I’m sold! We plan on getting the Business pack which includes a free control panel (seen below) to centrally manage all the accounts in the company. Everyone gets a Skype number and stays with the employee even if they move desks or even offices!

Our office is moving in the next couple months and that’s when we’re planning on really hooking the conference phones and cameras with the LCD television for full on conference calls with clients and partners. We’re excited for the upgrade of service/connectivity as well as the lower bills! Once our new office is setup I’ll surely be adding pictures but that is towards the end of this summer. In the meantime, let me know if you’re on Skype so I can add you as a contact. I’ll be checking back with my deeper thoughts on the user experience!

Do you use Skype at your office? For personal use? Let me know your thoughts, experiences and even share pictures if you have a nice conference setup.

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This entry was posted on Monday, May 12th, 2008 at 6:27 pm and is filed under Mobile, Online, Technology, Workflow. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.