Phones new location
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Yes, I have a client on my cell phone. Although in Europe we are unlikely to have good data plans on our cell phones.
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Who do you use to host? If it's not NTG, how much does it run? in writing this, I wonder if I asked you this before.
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@Dashrender said:
Who do you use to host? If it's not NTG, how much does it run? in writing this, I wonder if I asked you this before.
For me at home? I run through NTG's infrastructure, no reason not too. We need people testing constantly so using it for my home "production" is a very good test compared to an idle test environment.
If you were doing it on your own, no support and no need for special services you could get down to around $30 / month for everything, with four lines like I have. That includes a hosted VM plus the trunks.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Who do you use to host? If it's not NTG, how much does it run? in writing this, I wonder if I asked you this before.
For me at home? I run through NTG's infrastructure, no reason not too. We need people testing constantly so using it for my home "production" is a very good test compared to an idle test environment.
If you were doing it on your own, no support and no need for special services you could get down to around $30 / month for everything, with four lines like I have. That includes a hosted VM plus the trunks.
who would you host through?
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I'm sure that Amazon and Azure are great, but it is Rackspace that I have tested the most and know works really well.
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Unless you have a significant amount of inbound calling, VoIP.ms would be cheaper than VoicePulse for most.
They also have more POPS in more locations than VoicePulse.
I use both at clients and find VoIP.ms to be the better solution.
$0.99 - $1.50 per month for a DID.
$1.50 per month if you want e911.
All US calling inbound and outbound is $0.01 per minute.
There is no limit to the number of concurrent calls.VoicePulse is $11.00 per month with unlimited inbound calls
All outbound is $0.01 per minute.
I do not recall what their e911 costs are.
You may only have 4 concurrent calls.
Extra concurrent calls are $20 each.
Additional DID are $20 each. -
Also home users can setup GoogleVoice as a trunk in an Asterisk based system.
Using this, you can have unlimited outbound calling to the US for free, but restricted to one call at a time.
You can also take inbound calls with this number but who wants to be tied to a single concurrent call?
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@JaredBusch said:
Unless you have a significant amount of inbound calling, VoIP.ms would be cheaper than VoicePulse for most.
They also have more POPS in more locations than VoicePulse.
I use both at clients and find VoIP.ms to be the better solution.
$0.99 - $1.50 per month for a DID.
$1.50 per month if you want e911.
All US calling inbound and outbound is $0.01 per minute.
There is no limit to the number of concurrent calls.VoicePulse is $11.00 per month with unlimited inbound calls
All outbound is $0.01 per minute.
I do not recall what their e911 costs are.
You may only have 4 concurrent calls.
Extra concurrent calls are $20 each.
Additional DID are $20 each.VOIP.ms being 1 cent per min seems cheap, but I have no clue currently how many mins we use of local calling, our carrier doesn't include that on the bill. I'd say 60-70% of our calling is inbound, so $11.00 a month could be a huge savings there.
Thanks for the information though!
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@JaredBusch said:
VoIP.ms
There is no limit to the number of concurrent calls.A complaint that we receive today is that we have more lines coming into our office then we can handle. Basically the operators can see that there are 5+ callers on hold in the queue and this really just makes them have a nervous tick, don't ask me why other than they just don't really want to be operators answering calls all day long.
Would I assume correctly with the unlimited number of incoming calls that the inbound callers would just continue to stack up until my programming forced them to do something, for example, force to leave a message or hangup?
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Well with VoIP you control how calls are handled. You can send them to people, put them on hold, send them to voicemail, drop them, block them.... whatever you want. Even send them to people at home.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Well with VoIP you control how calls are handled. You can send them to people, put them on hold, send them to voicemail, drop them, block them.... whatever you want. Even send them to people at home.
Sure, that's not really any different than what I can do now... the biggest difference is that now, when my T1 fills up, they are forced into a voicemail box on the carrier's end.
The problem as I see it, is that we are worrying about the wrong thing. In the past we had 12 lines, at any given time you could assume 4 of them were in use for outgoing calls. This would leave 8 left over for incoming calls. We normally have around 6 'free' staff who could handle those 8 possible incoming calls. When more than 8 incoming calls happen, the rest were forced to a carrier voicemail that we'd pickup once an hour or so, depending on how busy the phones remained.
Today we have 23 incoming lines, still only 4 normally used for outbound and still only 6 'free' to handle those remaining now 19 lines.
The complaints from our Operators (first line people who answer the phones) is that they have visibility into how many of those remaining 19 lines have calls on them that are ringing waiting to be answered. When they see that those who are waiting are more than 2-3 they freak out feeling that we are ignoring our customers and want more people to help out answering the phones. Which is find, except that management has decided it does not want to hire more people to answer those phones. Additionally, the majority of those calls need to be handled by a medical staff member, and as I mentioned, at best we only have 6 of those available. So the Operators have been trained to take messages and the medical staff will call them back later. Well it's not uncommon for the patient to call back before the medical staff call them, or just as bad, they are playing phone tag - the patient doesn't want to leave yet another message, they want to talk to someone now....short of simply putting blinders on by reducing the number of lines coming in and forcing all other calls to the carrier voicemail or highering more personal, I don't know how to solve this.
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Could you automate the answering and distribution of calls? An IVR could do the basic receiving and routing of calls.
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Well with VoIP you control how calls are handled. You can send them to people, put them on hold, send them to voicemail, drop them, block them.... whatever you want. Even send them to people at home.
Sure, that's not really any different than what I can do now... the biggest difference is that now, when my T1 fills up, they are forced into a voicemail box on the carrier's end.
The problem as I see it, is that we are worrying about the wrong thing. In the past we had 12 lines, at any given time you could assume 4 of them were in use for outgoing calls. This would leave 8 left over for incoming calls. We normally have around 6 'free' staff who could handle those 8 possible incoming calls. When more than 8 incoming calls happen, the rest were forced to a carrier voicemail that we'd pickup once an hour or so, depending on how busy the phones remained.
Today we have 23 incoming lines, still only 4 normally used for outbound and still only 6 'free' to handle those remaining now 19 lines.
The complaints from our Operators (first line people who answer the phones) is that they have visibility into how many of those remaining 19 lines have calls on them that are ringing waiting to be answered. When they see that those who are waiting are more than 2-3 they freak out feeling that we are ignoring our customers and want more people to help out answering the phones. Which is find, except that management has decided it does not want to hire more people to answer those phones. Additionally, the majority of those calls need to be handled by a medical staff member, and as I mentioned, at best we only have 6 of those available. So the Operators have been trained to take messages and the medical staff will call them back later. Well it's not uncommon for the patient to call back before the medical staff call them, or just as bad, they are playing phone tag - the patient doesn't want to leave yet another message, they want to talk to someone now....short of simply putting blinders on by reducing the number of lines coming in and forcing all other calls to the carrier voicemail or highering more personal, I don't know how to solve this.
You can't. You can match anything that you have currently and can do more than you could do before, but technology doesn't magically overcome the basic limitation that people need to talk to people.
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We already do that. It has helped a little, but people call when they call. They want results, etc.
Most calls are not for new business, so it's not a like a company who wants to make sure they answer the phone 90% of the time, or more, to ensure the most business. But at the same time we don't want pissed off patients who can't call and get results in a reasonable time either.
The one thing I'm not hearing are patient complaints. Sure someone might complain to the person they finally get to, but currently we don't track those, maybe we should. And we definitely aren't getting an inordinate amount of patients calling asking for the 'boss' so they can complain about a problem getting through on the phone. If that happened regularly, I'm sure we'd look at adding more staff to take care of that problem.
