Connecting Your New Office

It is an exciting experience when you move into a new office. A blank canvas free of clutter and history can provide the feeling of starting afresh and embarking on a new chapter of your journey. While planning the layout of your furniture and organising your space may be fulfilling, there are many other aspects to sort out that can be frustrating and time-consuming. Connectivity is vital to establishing a fully-integrated office, which is reachable to clients. Here is a check-list to ensure that your office is up and running as it should be.

Business telephone lines

If you have a home office, it may be tempting to use a domestic landline as the main point of contact with clients. However, a business telephone line appears more professional and trustworthy and also means that family and friends do not answer your business calls. It is also helpful because you will avoid missing business calls because the line is occupied by a family member.

There are many types of telephone lines available for businesses. ISDN2e and ISDN30 are digital lines that facilitate connections using alternative channels for faxing and video. Single analogue lines benefit more basic needs such as receiving broadband, making calls and connecting to fax machines. Multi-line analogue is useful because it provides additional lines. This means that if a line is engaged, the call can reroute to a second line ensuring that you do not miss it. If you are going to be making numerous international calls, VoIP (Voice over IP) technology is worth investigating because it allows you to make free, or very low cost, local and overseas calls.

Different call providers offer various packages which might benefit your business. It is a good idea to read about the level of support that they offer if something goes wrong. It is also wise to review the extra features that they provide, such as caller display, call waiting, three-way calling, caller diversion and capped call charges which prevent overspending. Please be careful to analyse the contract before agreeing to it and confirm that is a viable long-term option.

Business Broadband

Domestic broadband might be ideal for your initial needs. However, a larger established business really requires a business broadband package. This will result in less downtime because business broadband users are given priority if there is a service problem. Business broadband also has a faster connection and typically has no cap on download limits.

Business grade broadband packages are available from 8Mbps and rise to 24 Mbps. When choosing a broadband package, it is important to consider how many people will be using it and how fast your business broadband connection needs to be. This is because more users result in the need for a faster connection which will make it more expensive. If your employees are only checking emails and surfing the web, there is no need for a package offering unlimited downloads, which can make it significantly cheaper. It is also imperative that you check the amount of technical support that a broadband provider is willing to afford your company.

Data Cabling

Network cabling infrastructure is one of the most important considerations for your business because data cables of an insufficient quality or a poor network design can hinder your business performance. Cat5e and Cat6 data cables are sufficient for most businesses’ needs.

It is vital that you find a reputable installer who will fit these cables correctly. Some installers will offer basic cabling installation while others will provide a complete building installation, which could be in excess of 400 network points. The installation of relevant equipment will include network cabinets, routers, switches and patch panels. A well installed network of cables will ensure that your business network will run to its full capacity and will, therefore, be extremely reliable.

A carefully considered business telephone line, quality data cabling and a great value broadband package could allow your business to run more efficiently and maximise profitability. It is crucial that you take time to select the best possible options for your business.

The history of video conferencing

Video conferencing is a business tool that we’ve learned to take for granted over the last few decades, but it may surprise you to know that it has its origins in the 1870’s, around one hundred years before we realised its full potential.

In the 1870’s, video as a new concept was tested as an addition to audio devices and it took over fifty years before further developments were made in video telephone technology by the AT&T company, Bell Labs, which utilised the expertise of John Logie Baird.

The Germans experimented with video conferencing towards the end of the 1930’s. Their method comprised video technology in the form of image telephones that sent photographs, so non-moving data, over telephone lines.

Again, there was another long wait before further progress. AT&T initiated its picture-phone service in the early 1970’s. This was video conferencing with moving images, much more recognisable to modern users. And then the 1980’s arrived and this really was the advent of a new era in communications, computing and technological growth. Video data components were designed and built, including video codecs.

Comell University developed CU-SeeMe software for video conferencing for Mac and Windows in 1992 and 1994, respectively, and these were released commercially in 1995. This facilitated the birth of internet radio stations.

Another university invention was the webcam. The first commercial webcam product was released in August 1994. The QuickCam was compatible with Mac and a personal computer version went on sale the following year.  This product was hailed as one of the best computer devices ever invented, by Time Magazine in 2010.

2004 in particular, was a landmark year for video conferencing. The rise of ISDN – integrated service digital networks – and the widespread adoption of mobile phones for personal and business use accelerated the popularity of video conferencing and made it available to all, whether they were stationary or mobile. Communication was in real time, convenient and cost effective which made it an essential business tool.

Video conferencing is a perfect device for building websites, collecting data, developing software and presenting demonstrations. Today, Skype is a commonly used form of video conferencing, although its capabilities are limited for business users and Skype’s insistence on a really broad bandwidth has rendered it unpopular with some in the business sector, it is a free cross platform service to customers. In 2011, Microsoft took ownership of the video chat services that Ebay and previous investors had held since 2003.

Interactive online trade shows are a fantastic way to save on travel expenses, while being able to market your products around the globe and within a company. Meetings can be held wherever participants are based, without the need to travel into the same office to connect. It makes communication easier and more personal, simply and effectively.

If you aren’t using your video conferencing to its full potential, it’s probable that you’re costing your business money, so why not investigate it, it’s come a long way since 1870!

If you would like to find out more about how you can take advantage of video conferencing technology, contact Midland Networks today. We specialise in the supply, installation and maintenance of business telephone systems across Birmingham and the surrounding areas.  

Could You Improve Efficiency in Your Business with Unified Communications?

According to Gartner, consumers will be managing 85% of their business relationships digitally, without the need to interact with humans, by 2020. Research shows that the vast majority of people already have a tendency to visit a company’s website before they decide to contact them via telephone or email and that most people would be more likely to revisit a site that offers them a live chat option. The range of tools that we are using to communicate with businesses is expanding. In the past, customers communicated with businesses face-to-face or on the telephone, but the modern business communications infrastructure has to incorporate a whole range of platforms including email, text messaging, social media, video and web conferencing as well as the more traditional voice communications.

Consumers expect to have a whole range of communications options available to them nowadays and this puts pressure on businesses to implement and manage a range of technologies and media. These days, however, competitiveness in business increasingly depends on the ability to do this effectively. Unified Communications (UC) technology provides a solution to this challenge. Connecting to business telephone systems, UC software integrates a wide range of communications tools onto a single platform for enhanced communication and collaboration across multiple devices and locations.

With all of your business communications tools being unified and interconnected, UC technology allows you to communicate with customers and colleagues in whichever manner best suits your needs in any given situation. It also incorporates presence information, for enhanced collaboration in a working environment that is more fluid than ever before. Advances in mobile technology have changed workforce dynamics. Smartphones and tablets allow more of us to work outside of the office, whether from home or on the go. UC solutions keep remote workers connected with colleagues and engaged with the company.

As well as improving employee collaboration and enabling a better level of customer service, Unified Communications can also help to increase revenues and productivity. Because collaboration is made so much easier by UC technology, working processes become streamlined. Regardless of the location of individual team members, everyone can get together quickly to discuss ideas and make decisions about projects. Greater efficiency and productivity enables a business to reduce costs which, in turn, increases their profits.

Could your business benefit from Unified Communications?

If you think your current communications infrastructure is limiting your business’ potential, then Unified Communications technology could be the ideal solution. Consider the following:

• Think about how your company operates; do you have flexible working policies in place and/or have field workers in a variety of locations? Do your employees work on a range of different devices including PCs, tablets, laptops and smartphones?
• Is it necessary/ desirable for all employees to have information on the location and availability of their colleagues at any given time?
• Do you have a need for real-time collaboration incorporating multiple parties at any given time?
• Do your customers like to have a variety of avenues for communication with your business and, if so, how are these currently managed?

If you are considering investing in Unified Communications, think about how the technology would integrate with the systems and processes that you currently have in place. If you need to invest in a new office phone system that could support the technology, this will be an additional cost to factor in. It’s worth consulting with a specialist business communications provider, as they will be able to advise you about whether the technology is suitable for your business and how best it can be implemented within the specific conditions of your organisation.

If you would like specialist advice and information about modern business telephone systems that support Unified Communications technology, contact Midland Networks today. 

VoIP telephone systems: key benefits for small business

Sometimes the technology choices available to small businesses seem confusing, but actually it’s quite simple to enjoy the key benefits of cutting edge internet telephony. Small businesses with either analogue or digital phones are increasingly recognising the raft of benefits offered by embracing technology that provides greater performance for voice and video calls and enhances communications cost effectiveness.  

VoIP, which stands for Voice Over Internet Protocol and is also known as internet telephony, is a private telephone network operated through an internet service. Originally, it was only offered to large corporations to use, but now it is available to all size businesses, whatever their requirements, including cloud technology.

This is done via a computer-to-computer system, negating the need for the old circuitry of a traditional telephone system and offering the facility of low cost, secure calls. The potential cost savings enabled by VoIP is probably the primary benefit of VoIP, from a small business perspective.

Cloud based VoIP systems are excellent for expanding businesses that have a set budget for communication and storage, additional lines can be added and sent to the cloud as the client chooses. Cloud data storage can be obtained either via a private cloud protected by the company’s dedicated firewall, public cloud storage comes from a service provider on a multi-tenant basis and the hybrid cloud is a combination of the private and public clouds with at least one of each in operation.  

SIP, or Session Initiation Protocol, technology is frequently adopted for a VoIP system. SIP routes telephone calls from a client’s private branch exchange within the VoIP system to a circuitry based public switched telephone network, also known as PSTN.

VoIP works at internet hotspots offering full flexibility for making calls or call/messages pick up opportunities. This results in the level of service offered by field staff and home workers being enhanced. This is a major benefit for many small businesses, which are increasingly employing flexible workers.

VoIP telephone systems can be owned outright or businesses can rent a hosted system. Hosted VoIP telephone systems are ideal for small businesses because the service is managed and maintained by the provider, thereby reducing on-site IT expenditure. The hosted service is charged on a per-user basis, which is a cost-effective model for small companies with fewer users.

Voicemail, call waiting and call transfers are standard features, but here are some examples of the extra key benefits of a VoIP telephone system:

• Video conferencing at HD standard.
• Voice conference calls at the highest performance levels.
• Extensions are easily located and operational via the VoIP system.
• Quick access for field staff to voicemail with message notifications.
• Call diverting to a selection of numbers before the voicemail function is activated.
• Voicemail to e-mail transcribed messages.
• On hold music.
• Door entry system connectivity.

• Do not disturb option.
• Call screening.
• Call activity reporting tools.
• Call recording facilities.
• Training facilities with barge and whisper options for on call assistance from management for team members.
• Powerful but lower cost communications to the small business.
• Improved customer service.
• Easy to expand systems, serving today’s needs as well as those of the future.

VoIP is perceived as the future of telephony; it’s not only financially kind, but perfect for the everyday user and particularly well-suited to the needs of the small business.  

Midland Networks supplies VoIP telephone systems in Birmingham and the surrounding areas. For more information, get in touch today. 

Protect Your Business with a Telephone System Maintenance Contract

Have you ever experienced a significant fault with your business telephone system? If the answer is yes, then you will know just how costly and disruptive to your business this can be. In this article, we explain how a telephone system maintenance contract can help you protect your profits, protect your budget, protect your reputation and, ultimately, protect your business.

Protect your profits

For a great many of us, our business telephone systems are mission-critical. We simply can’t operate without them. So when a major fault occurs, it can bring a business to a standstill. Downtime is a financial nightmare for any company; the longer the period of downtime, the greater the financial losses in terms of wasted employee hours and missed sales opportunities. If you don’t have a maintenance contract, it is likely that you won’t be given priority when it comes to emergency engineers. This could extend the length of downtime and further eat into your profits. If you end up having to wait for replacement parts before a repair can be carried out, your systems will be down for even longer. If you have a maintenance contract, on the other hand, you will benefit from ongoing preventative maintenance work and always be given priority in the event of an emergency engineer being necessary. Your provider will know what system you are using and, therefore, will be likely to be able to repair it much quicker. It is also likely that they will have many parts already in stock, enabling them to carry out the repair in the shortest possible time. Time is money and this can seriously help to protect your profits.  

Protect your budget

Yes, a telephone system maintenance contract is an ongoing cost. But, the good thing about paying a fixed monthly or annual fee for such a service is that it is a predictable expenditure. Your finance department will love you for this. If you don’t have a maintenance contract, you will, of course, enjoy periods with no expense paid for the technical upkeep of your phone system. The trouble is that these periods of reduced expenditure will always be interrupted by periods of high expenditure. When something goes wrong with your phone system, it will cost you a significant amount of money if you don’t have a maintenance contract in place. You will have to pay an emergency engineer call out fee, which alone could run into hundreds of pounds, then the cost of any parts that are needed plus an hourly rate for labour. If yours is a small business, chances are that you won’t have substantial amounts of cash put away for emergencies and so a major telephone system fault could be a disaster for your company. If you have a maintenance contract, on the other hand, you will benefit from ongoing maintenance work which can help to prevent a major system fault occurring, but if a fault does occur, the cost of call out, parts and repair will be covered by the monthly fee you are paying for the contract.

Protect your reputation

A good standard of customer service is expected by consumers and, therefore, vital if you want to attract and retain customers. The fast-paced nature of the society that we live in makes us all a little impatient. When we need to contact a business, we expect them to be available and ready to assist us quickly and efficiently. If you’re experiencing downtime due to a technical fault with your phone system, you will not be able to respond to customers when they try to contact you. This situation can cause significant reputational damage, which can be difficult to overcome. When customers get annoyed because they don’t receive the service they expect from a company, they are often tempted to take their custom elsewhere. In the worst cases, they will also share their experiences with friends and family, potentially losing you more customers in the future. A telephone system maintenance contract can help to protect against reputational damage by ensuring that your phone system is properly looked after and making sure it is repaired in the shortest possible time, should anything major go wrong.

If your business is based in the West Midlands area and you would like to find out more about protecting your business with a telephone system maintenance contract, contact us today.

How to Survive as a Little Fish in a Big Pond

How to Survive as a Little Fish in a Big Pond

When it comes to being a small business in a large industry, it can sometimes be a real struggle to keep up with your competitors, especially when it comes to your marketing budget. The first thing you need to do is to put your advertising on hold and follow these top tips that we have put together to help you be more creative with your marketing budget. The great thing about being a small business is that you can be flexible, so use that to your advantage and see which top tips could work for you:

• Use social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to direct traffic through to your website. By sharing links to blog posts that are on your website, product pages on your website and free downloads that can be downloaded from your website, you will increase the activity on your social media pages whilst, at the same time, increasing the traffic to your website. These visitors can very easily turn into customers for your business if you have something that is of interest to them.
• Maybe you have an event coming up? You could pay to advertise it in the local paper or you could save money and make an event page on Facebook, as well as uploading your event on your website, on Gumtree and Eventbrite – all of which can be used for free and will increase the awareness of your brand and your event.
• Why not grow your brand awareness on Facebook with a like and share competition? You can offer a free service, product or even a box of chocolate or bunch of flowers for people that like and share your Facebook page. A winner can then be chosen at random. You just need to make sure you keep the new fans interested with engaging posts.
• Keep your social media profiles up to date. This doesn’t mean spending every minute of every day on your social media pages; instead, look for a free social media scheduling tool like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck, which will allow you to schedule posts to your social media platforms in advance to save you time that can be spent elsewhere.
• Have a look at free email newsletter programs, like Mailchimp, where you can send newsletters to your contacts for free. You can even write a few months’ worth of emails now and schedule them to be sent at a later date.
• Utilise your existing technology. You can use your business telephone system to advertise to callers, for example. Whether you record messages for your automated attendant or use advertising on hold, it’s a great way to inform callers about offers or services they may be interested in. You could also take the opportunity to direct callers to your website, where they will then be exposed to your full range of services. They may find that you offer services of interest to them that they weren’t aware you offered.

When you’re a small business, you may feel like a small fish in a big pond, but you are also really flexible compared to larger organisations. This means that you can try a greater range of marketing methods with a lower marketing budget, so get experimenting!

At Midland Networks, we are proud to help SMEs nurture their business. We have a wealth of experience in this area and are always happy to offer advice and support. We also offer a great range of affordable solutions, many with flexible contracts and pricing plans, to help your small business budget go further, whilst also providing innovative solutions aimed to help you grow your business. Contact us today for more information. 

How Hosted VoIP Telephone Systems Can Lower Business Costs

The internet has changed our lives in ways we could never have imagined. Almost every aspect of our day-to-day lives have been affected by our love of the information superhighway. How we connect to family and friends, buy almost any product and manage our time has, to some degree, been changed. Probably the biggest change throughout the world is communication.

The way we talk to each other, the way we contact friends, family, colleagues and associates has revolutionised the way we live and do business. We no longer have to rely on the phone on our desk to make calls through traditional PBX networks. The internet has given us email, simple video conferencing and yet, the telephone still plays a huge role in business. Whilst the handset hasn’t changed too much, the way calls are connected has. We are no longer at the mercy of the telephone companies and physical phone lines when it comes to calling numbers around the world, we now have Voice Over Internet Protocol, or VoIP for short.

VoIP is a way of making telephone calls over the internet, rather than through traditional phone lines. Because VoIP is a digital service, the costs of the calls are lower than traditional phone calls and, in some cases, completely free. They work by converting your voice into digital information which can then be sent over the internet in exactly the same way as any other form of digital traffic, like email or web pages. It might sound like something from Tomorrow’s World, but it’s here now and can lower your business costs significantly.

If you’re running a business in these turbulent economic times, anything that can lower your costs is a welcome addition. With that in mind, utilising a hosted VoIP telephone system for your company’s telephony might just be exactly what you’re looking for. Hosted VoIP is the same concept, except another telephony company will handle all the technological heavy lifting, meaning all you have to worry about is making and receiving the calls.

The first cost benefit is the reduction in pricing of high-speed internet access. We’ve come a long way from the painfully slow days of dial-up. We now have incredibly fast access and the costs of these are coming down all the time, as the market matures and the barriers to entry are lowered. These cost savings are being passed all the way down the line, especially when it comes to VoIP.

Depending on the size of your company, your initial outlay in transferring to VoIP can range from a lot to very little, particularly when compared to traditional PBX systems. Again, depending on your size, the cost might even be zero. As we’ve said, VoIP requires an internet connection, but it also depends on how many simultaneous users you expect to have. The more users you have, the more bandwidth you’re going to need. If you’re a small business, your existing connection may be enough. There may also be a cost to upgrading your handsets, but many modern telephones are already IP-compliant. If not, you can always utilise so-called soft-phones. These are pieces of software that mimic the use of a telephone, but live on your computer as software. Skype is probably the most well-known soft-phone available.

The benefits of hosted VoIP don’t end there. The major selling point of VoIP isn’t just the technicalities of how the calls are made, but the calls themselves. Because you are using an internet connection, many calls become free. Calls that stay within the hosting company’s client base will also be free, as will inter-site calls between locations. It will only be when calls need to connect to external, traditional PBX-based systems, that costs will incur. You are also getting feature-rich packages including call-waiting, call routing, conference calls and even instant messaging for less than ever before.

Hosted VoIP also offers rapid scaling that is both easy and cost-effective. If you expand your operations quickly, the outlay for new equipment will be minimal and new staff can be up and running in no time.

VoIP isn’t going to be for everyone and everyone will have a different set of criteria and circumstances, but for more and more businesses, VoIP is a very real alternative in an increasingly virtual world.

For the best deals on VoIP telephone systems in Birmingham and across the West Midlands, contact us at Midland Networks today.