VoIP Industry Newsletter: Essential Hosted PBX features for Carriers and Service Providers

What Features Do Small- and Medium-sized Businesses Really Want--and Need--from Hosted PBX?

Invariably, as part of the pre-sales process at VoIP Logic, when we introduce carriers to our Class 5 Hosted PBX managed services, there are numerous options to consider. With a base of BroadSoft, Acme Packet and Genband technology, we receive requests for a litany of cool next-generation integrations from MS Outlook and browser telephony bars, pre-built brand-able Android/iPhone/Blackberry applications, MS Office Communication Service to next generation integration with telepresence and Smart Homes. Strangely, though, few add-ons to basic business telephone services actually see high usage among small and medium-sized business users. After working with numerous Hosted PBX service providers, here are my observations. They are divided into two categories – ‘table stakes’ - features that seem to have become the industry standard for a hosted PBX offering and ‘future growth’ - those whose robust use and growth prospects are encouraging.

Understanding the context for this market is straightforward. All carriers, service providers, cable companies, etc., selling Hosted PBX services to enterprises—from very small businesses of 1-5 users to the huge middle market of 20-500 users—are perpetually tailoring their offering to resonate with and, ideally, differentiate themselves in the market. Many features play well in a demo but do not see high use among certain types of users you might be targeting. Most interesting are the features that get high use, are unique to VoIP technology, and are increasingly found in broad circulation. Of special note, the recent FCC report on Internet Access Services as of June 30, 2010 stated that almost 50% of total Internet connections are from mobile devices. These connections didn’t exist five years ago. This trend means that there is a significantly broader spectrum of devices where VoIP and VoIP Telephony can be used and managed. I’ll take some guesses on which features will best maximize broadband to the mobile phone.

Standard or ‘table stakes’ Features
VoIP first reached the end-user as a consumer product through services like Vonage, Skype and all of the large cable companies. Some of the features that consumers liked then are still extremely popular in business VoIP. There are some other features that the Hosted PBX format has made more affordable and have flourished at lower price points. These include:

1. Simultaneous Ring, Find Me – Follow Me and other ‘telephone calendar management’ controls that let you preset controls to manage who can reach you where and when. There is more work that can create even easier tools for managing these settings via mobile devices, and I suspect we’re just beginning to see disruptive innovation in this sector. One thing is for sure: these apps are rapidly increasing in circulation.
2. Billing Codes and Billing Authorization are used in many types of companies, particularly for international calling and as a matter of practice in law firms. This is the feature that asks for a Billing Code so the call can later be identified with a Customer or Account or requires a valid code in order to even place the outbound call – Billing Authorization. Now that you don’t need a very specialized system to support this feature, more enterprises like to use it.
3. Believe it or not, it is important to enterprise users what numbers they are pushing into the telephone when they are making a telephone call. If you are in downtown Los Angeles you and are calling a (213) area code number, business users want to dial just 7 digits. With the proliferation in the past 15 years of area codes, cell phones and VoIP, I would think most people have given up on 7-digit dialing – but I’d be wrong.
4. Web portals and online account management have become the standard with VoIP. You can do a lot with online portals to differentiate your service offering and some carriers do a great job. In particular, allowing online provisioning, account management, billing and trouble management can reduce real time customer support workload.
5. Voicemail to email is almost universally used by Hosted PBX users and VoIP Consumer users. Receiving a voicemail on your smart-phone also means you can manage it ‘visually’.

Future Growth Features
All ready there are dozens of smart phone VoIP applications and there are many companies pursuing interesting voice telephony integration projects. Here are a few of the interesting capabilities that VoIP technology is bringing to a mass audience:

1. Telephone integration everywhere. Because your SIP User ID is portable you can use it in any device with a speaker, a microphone and a network connection – nowadays pretty much anything electronic. Most notable, is the ability to create smart phone applications that extend the phone presence for calling and management to this huge segment of business users. A lot of devices already use VoIP including - Tablets, Smart Phones, iPods, computers, laptops and even baby monitors.
2. Presence Management. Your telephone presence is a hugely important piece of information to most efficiently use the phone. Your status can dictate both how your callers react and how the call is routed. Skype has a huge advantage in this space with its IM/Telephony integrated software. There are some significant network compatibility hurdles to be cleared before this works inter-company, but that’s just around the corner.
3. Interactive, Easy-to-Manage Auto-Attendants. Most businesses prefer to have an auto-attendant to direct new callers to the right department or person—even two-person companies like this feature. Before VoIP and other technology breakthroughs this was a lot more expensive. Now, with the ease of creating, supporting and recording the prompts for your own auto-attendant, and an affordable price in the market, it seems like auto attendants are beginning to proliferate..
4. CRM Integration. This feature appeals mainly to larger sales organizations. However, since this makes up a significant portion of almost every company it becomes a large part of the market for innovation. As CRM providers offer advanced integration at more affordable prices that appeal to the 20-100 person company, address book, sales lead, and contact database integration will take off.
5. Voice integrated with more web applications and web pages. Slowly, the dawn of instant voice on the Web is arriving. Already, a lot of things are sold on the web and many sites have Instant Messenger easily available. It seems likely that there will be a significant increase in the use of VoIP capabilities — potentially coupled with Presence Management – in standard planning for a web site in years to come.

I don’t have all the answers and not a long format to write on the topic, but this trend is very important to all service providers selling Hosted PBX services to SMEs. What are the standard-set features most enterprises are requesting? How will the technology evolve over the next five-to-15 years? Tell me what you think, and if we receive enough responses, we will share the results similar to the new VoIP Stats and Data section [download Newsletter PDF here for statistics] included this month. I welcome your feedback at micah@ voiplogic.com about other features you have seen that have either caught on because of VoIP or you think are starting to gain traction in a meaningful way.
micah@voiplogic.com
Micah Singer, CEO

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