Skype, the worldwide communications service for low cost real time conversations, has partnered with several developer partners who offer communications enhanced business solutions that significantly reduce business process costs.
The impact of Skype’s partner offerings is often to open up to small businesses many communications tools that have traditionally been considered only to be cost effective for larger enterprises. Services that formerly would have cost as much as six figure numbers to implement and significant overhead to manage can now be implemented for under $50 per seat per month with little or no ongoing overhead. In effect enterprises deploying these services can focus on managing people and business processes instead of technology platforms.
The business tools offered by Skype’s partners include:
- Web Conferencing – creating a persistent virtual boardroom for sharing slide shows, video, co-browsing and applications across a geographically disbursed business team.
- Desktop Sharing – an additional conversation mode that complements Skype-enabled voice, text and video conversations through real time application sharing
- Call center management: responding to prospects and customer inquiries whether initiated either via the web or from a traditional landline phone
- Fax transmission – turn any Skype-enabled PC into a portable, worldwide fax transmission device from any location with a broadband Internet connection
- Hosted unified messaging services: manage, archive and search a business’s voice, text and email conversations via single manager interface
- Hosted voice services – create asynchronous conversations over the web
- Skype conversation management utilities – for call recording, personalization, enhanced voice mail, podcasting and local session archiving
- Business grade conference calls: a service that provides robust, scalable hosting of conference calls involving three to 500 participants with worldwide access via either Skype (unlimited) or traditional PSTN lines.
Benefits of these tools include:
- Simply require a suitable PC, web browser and broadband Internet connection
- Easy Skype installation: it’s been done over a quarter billion times worldwide.
- Initiate conversations from any location worldwide: ideal for road warriors
- Access any of these services at any location worldwide: hotel rooms, airport lounges, vacation destinations – any location with broadband Internet access
- No technology management overhead: the partners’ services are responsible for dealing with all the technology platform management issues including server installation and mangement, 24/7 uptime, software upgrades, user authentication and access, security issues and all the other issues that arise with internal system management.
- Employee training is reduced to learning how to use these tools within a business’s internal business processes. Vendors provide help tools, FAQ’s and various modes of technical support to ensure employees are up and running quickly while providing ongoing tools for any questions that may arise.
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