Lots of small businesses I’ve been talking about recently, realize the need to look and sound professional to their current and future customers. For ANY business today, no matter which industry group, the two most visible channels of communication with the outside world are

* Telephone and
* Web Presence

I’ll talk more about importance of the web in a separate post.

Let’s consider the other channel. The good old telephone line!

Your business already has one or more telephone lines. What you’re probably missing is a modern PBX. Ask yourself this:

1. Do you have a professional sounding Auto-Attendant ? A receptionist? Does the call go right into Voicemail if no one picks it up?
2. Can you route incoming call to multiple internal phones? Probably a group of Engineers or Sales Managers?
3. Voice Menus? Press 1 to reach customer support. Press 2 to reach Sales.
4. Voice mails. If you’re on road, does your voice mail follow you into your Email Inbox?
5. Love your Employees – let them work from home few days in the week. Can their extension be routed to their home phones or their computers transparently?
6. Conferencing. Can you and your clients hold a conference call?
7. Last but not least, are you spending a fortune on long distance phone bills?

None of these are exotic features anymore. These are minimum necessities for a business to sound and look professional. The Good news is ALL of the above are now possible with the VoIP technology and Open Source Software. And, no, I’m not talking amateur geeky equipment. I’m talking business grade serious equipment which runs reliably without costing an arm.

Truth be told, you can buy VoIP infrastructure from big boys like Cisco and Avaya costing thousands of dollars. But with today’s mature open source technologies, I simply see no need to go with big boys. Budgets are tight. We’re all trying to do more with less.

At Yellowfish, we work exclusively with small businesses. Let us know your comments and we can setup a Demo for your business.
Also, please don’t hesitate to leave your thoughts on your VoIP experiences from the past, if any.

Recently, I read an article at forbes.com talking about VoIP and how a small business in Cincinnati took advantage of VoIP based system from Cisco to upgrade itself, look professional and add remote employees etc. That got me thinking about the price. They paid 12K for the Cisco system which could have been achieved in under 2K (for their size) using Asterisk and FreePBX. Feature by feature, open source Asterisk has everything they needed!

• Remote Extensions
• Voicemail to Email
• Softphones
• Call Routing

Here’s an opportunity for players like us to penetrate the small business telephony market. As I see it, major hurdles are

• Marketing and Brand Recognition
• Service Guarantees

Marketing and Brand Recognition

Most smaller businesses are handicapped for Marketing dollars. We’ve to get ingenious about letting the world know of our presence and services. Thankfully, at least for tech businesses, there is google and the ‘Inbound Marketing’ – which basically says you’re only as good as your google rankings. Google is the most visible marketing channel today using it effectively is not a luxury but a requirement. It’s imperative to spend time and money on google SEO and maketing.

Service Guarantees

How do we compete against big names like Cisco and Avaya when it comes to service and reliability? The argument that we should be extending to our prospective customers is that the service guarantees are indeed a function of your SIP trunk vendor and not really come from Cisco. On a day to day basis, you’re dependent upon the VoIP carrier which provides Inbound calls to your premises and Outbound termination to PSTN. It has nothing to do with Cisco. We help our customers find the most reliable VoIP provider for their needs and maybe have relationship with multiple carriers for redundancy.

The Equipment itself consists of an Intel PC and can be as reliable as the customer wants. A high end custom PC made with top of the line components can be had for around $1000.00 (for a 10 person company, this would suffice). Still MUCH cheaper than Cisco equipment. Pair it with an UPS and a QoS server for another $1000.00 and you’re in business! The PCs, especially, ones made with high grade components are quite reliable.
If the customer insists on extra guarantees, one can even setup a redundant server with fail-over option – something Cisco won’t provide without significant extra dollars!

I think, especially, in these tough times, when every business, small or large, is forced to do more with less budget, such moves make even more sense.

So, if you’re looking to save money and still sound professional to your customers, it’s time to give Asterisk a try!