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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
1. Is it not better to be in full control by having our in-house PBX compared to a Hosted PBX?
You are probably already in a position that you are dependant on the phone company and your PBX vendor for anything you want to do. You have to call your PBX vendor for a service call every time you want to do a simple adds, move or change. Conversely, with our Hosted Service, you are in full control of administration and end user set up through our Browser-Based Administration and Browser-Based User Interfaces.
2. Can I trust VoIP technology?
Our service is a Business-Grade Hosted Service. We utilize Commercial-Quality Business VoIP when needed in order to provide a more efficient, feature-rich and flexible service. We do not deploy VoIP as you may know it and we don't send calls over the public Internet. We deliver your service via a dedicated, private, point-to-point T1 directly from your premises to our carrier-grade switch that sits on the PSTN (Public Switching Telephone Network). Therefore, your calls go over the traditional PSTN while in our network, just like your traditional analog phone company lines. However, you also enjoy the efficient and flexible Dynamic T1 technology. VoIP has come a long way and we use a SIP-based VoIP protocol, which is commercial-grade and very reliable and efficient.
3. How about security? We are concerned about security and hackers!
Actually, it is much easier to "hack" into your analog phone lines (POTS: Plain Old Telephone Service), PBX or your voice T1. Anyone with a traditional bud set can tap into your lines and listen and record your conversations. Also, your PBX is widely exposed to everyone all day in your phone room or the public phone closet. Conversely, it is very difficult to hack or tap into a digitized packet over our SIP-based dynamic T1. You can't just plug something in and listen or record a packet. It will take tremendous effort and knowledge, expensive equipment and free access to your premise-based router for anyone to be able to threaten your security. With our service and technology, you will be much more secure than you are now.
4. Aren't POTS more stable than T1, if T1 goes down, we are completely down.
POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) may be stable compared to some Voice T1s (non-SIP-Based VoIP) services out there. However, businesses deploy technology in order to gain efficiency, realize better productivity and save costs. Are you a 100% happy with your cell-phone service? With our Broadcore Hosted Service we have built-in redundancy that allows you to still have a functioning Auto Attendant, Voicemail and still receive calls on your cell phone or any remote location immediately. Furthermore, what if your POTS are okay and your PBX is down, or your building is destroyed. You will still be down, but not with our Redundancy-enabled Hosted PBX Service.
5. Isn't Hosted Service too expensive?
This is not true if you add all of your monthly or periodical costs associated with your entire telecom and Internet services. In addition to your monthly recurring phone lines, local and long distance usage charges, Internet charges, PBX lease, and PBX service maintenance charges, You need to factor in hidden costs or non-recurring costs as well such as PBX maintenance or upgrades (that may happen occasionally), multi-party conferencing charges that only a department manager or accountant may be aware of, Electronic Faxing subscription charges, Unified Messaging subscription charges, management calling cards, etc.
Also, assign a dollar value in your analysis to hidden efficiency factors such as saving time and therefore labor costs on included Broadcore features such as:
- Administration: The Broadcore IP phones and browser-based administration and user interfaces allow for self-admin and eliminate the adds, moves, change costs that generate large monthly expenses for some companies
- Built-in Redundancy: The cost of losing business may be the largest expense any business faces. Ask your prospect to tell you how much it will cost them on lost business if their phone lines, PBX, building facilities, power, etc. are down. With Broadcore, they do not miss a call or voicemail. Ask them how much is this built-in redundancy and not losing business is worth to them on monthly basis, and then factor it in.
- Working from Anywhere/Virtual Office: Broadcore allows staff or management to work from anywhere, eliminating the need for unnecessary commute or additional office space. Find out if this is something that they value and can allocate a monthly cost to.
- Lifetime Training: Some companies have high employee turn over and as a result there is a tremendous burden on the internal administrator(s) or they incur vendor-provided retraining costs. Broadcore provides life-time training on weekly basis through Live Meeting.
- Electronic faxing: View faxes on PC. Faxes are emailed with an attached file that you may double click and view, forward or save. As per Wall Street Journal, employees don't have to waste 7 minutes per fax per employee every time they want to pick up their faxes from the fax machine. A 20-person company with 30% (6 people) receiving 3 faxes a day (18 faxes) can save almost $700 per month considering an average salary of $15/hour and 22-day work month: (18x7x22) : 60x $15= $693
- Unified Messaging: Listen to voicemail on PC. Voicemails are emailed with an attached WAV file, which when clicked on, will automatically open and play through a standard Windows Media player. With traditional voicemail, one has to listen to all messages and take notes. Then if one needs to go back and listen to a message again, he/she has to skip through multiple messages to get to the right one. With Unified Messaging and voicemail in email format, one can take notes on the subject line as he/she is listening to the message the first time, so finding and referring back to it is much faster, because it's like an email with a subject line. The Media Player controls also allow fast forwarding the message. The time savings is tremendous and at least the same $700 monthly cost savings could be applied to this as well.
6. Should I put all of our eggs in one basket? (dealing with one company for everything is risky):
Dealing with one company gives you advantages that outweigh any disadvantages. With Broadcore, you will not have to worry about multiple points of failure on your in-house telecom hardware platform. You will not have to deal with multiple vendors and bills who may consume too much time and money. Dealing with one vendor gives you accountability and a better peace of mind. For example, there is no finger-pointing when an issue comes up that may point to a hardware (phones) or phone service. We take full responsibility for every aspect of the platform, network and service.
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