Hosted PBX Services for Retail Companies

If your retail organization needs a better phone system, this video is for you.

Not all hosted PBX services are equal.

Some are better suited for retail companies than others.

In this video, AeroCom President, Mike Smith tells you three things to look for, when you are shopping for a hosted VoIP service for your retail company.

Want to know which Hosted PBX service providers offer these 3 things? Click the button below to ask Mike.

Ask Mike

About Mike
Mike Smith is the Founder and President of AeroCom and has been helping companies with telecom and cloud services since 1999. He has been the recipient of numerous business telecommunications industry awards and in 2011, he was honored as one of the top 40 business people in Orange County, CA., under 40 years old. You can also hear him as the host of the popular Information Technology podcast, ITsmiths with Mike Smith. Follow Mike on LinkedIn, Twitter or SpiceWorks.

Transcript

Which hosted VoIP services are best for large retail organizations? Well, there’s dozens of hosted VoIP service providers. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. But which of those are best for companies with a lot of retail sites? There are certain service providers who are better suited for that type of an organization. So if you’re working on an IT team and right now your project is looking for a new phone system, you work for a large retail company, this is definitely a video for you.

All right… The first thing that I would recommend for a large retail organization is to find a company probably with unbundled pricing. Assuming that your company is not on the phone a ton, if your company is on the phone a ton and almost every extension is live on a call all the time, this may not apply to you, but most large retail organizations have one to two extensions at every location and maybe they have 500, 5,000 locations and definitely not all of them are on the phone simultaneously, if you really look at everything from a national basis.

So unbundled pricing. What that means is that users or extensions are priced separately than call paths. So typically for most hosted VoIP service providers, they bundle in a call path with every single user and you pay for it. So you pay a little bit more. You don’t realize it, but it’s because a call path is included. Well, that makes sense if you have a very tiny company like a micro sized company with two employees or five employees, because there’s a very good chance with five employees that all five people will be on the phone at the same time. But if your company has 5,000 employees, there is a very small chance that 5,000 people are going to be on the phone simultaneously. In fact, I would guess that there’s almost a 0% chance. In fact, you probably only need 500 phone call paths of 5,000 employees typically.

So unbundled pricing, number one, is going to save you a ton of money if you’re a large retail organization because instead of paying $20 per month per user, you’re going to pay something like $5-$10 per month per user and then only like maybe $20 per month per call path that you actually need. So using that type of pricing, you’ll have a much lower monthly cost with a large retail organization. So that’s number one.

Number two is, decide if you need a key system functionality. So key phone system is an old term for an old phone system where you can have line one, line two, line three. So if a call comes in at of your retail locations, if they like to put it on call park and put it online one and say, “Hey Jim, call for you online one,” they’d like to make an announcement maybe over a loud speaker.

So Jim can go to any phone anywhere, maybe in a warehouse or it maybe in a back stock room phone or things like that and pick it up and hit line one and take that call. If that functionality is important to you there are companies that specialize in creating that with just a single button push. Some companies say, “Oh, we can do that, but it takes two or three buttons to do it.” You don’t want that. You want a single button push to be able to put a call on hold online one and announced over the loudspeaker that Jim needs to take a call online one. So there are companies who specialize in that.

The last thing I would recommend that you do if you’re a large retail organization is look for hosted VoIP service providers who offer a low-price extension, maybe an extension without voicemail.

A lot of times, large retail organizations, they don’t need voicemail at a lot of their extensions at the different retail stores, they just need a live extension where people can answer incoming calls, but maybe voicemails go to corporate or something like that. They don’t really need voicemail necessarily or maybe they don’t need a lot of other features. They just want it very, very simple. So find a hosted VoIP service provider that offers a very inexpensive, low frills, no thrills option for extensions for your retail sites maybe, or at least one of the extensions that each retail sites need something very basic that’ll drive costs down quite a bit.

So number one, look for unbundled pricing. Number two, look for providers who can maybe provide key system functionality. And number three, look for providers who offer low priced extension options for extensions that maybe don’t need a direct number, maybe don’t need voicemail, maybe don’t need a lot of features.

Which providers are good for that stuff?

Well, it depends on your other requirements. That’s where I come in.

I’ve been doing this for 20 years. I’m a broker for all the different hosted VoIP service providers. Call me, at 714-465-3533, or email me, I’m happy to give you my recommendations of the three to five hosted VoIP companies your business should be quoting and why.

And the nice thing is our company does not charge you a dime for our recommendation. So don’t waste hours on Google trying to find these companies. You’ll never find the right ones and you’ll waste a ton of your time. Don’t do it. Just call me. Shoot me an email. I’m happy to give you some great recommendations and get you started out on the right foot, also, introduce you to these companies and make sure you’re talking to the right people within these organizations. I hope that was helpful. Let me know if you have any questions. Have a great day.