This article originally appeared in the Oct. 2011 issue of INTERNET TELEPHONY
There are plenty of virtual PBX (News - Alert) solution providers in the market place. Sorting through them all to find the right one for your business needs can be a challenge. But a company called Voice Carrier (News - Alert) has a special approach to pricing that can result in significant savings for businesses, while at the same time outfitting them with highly reliable and feature-rich solutions.
“Our core market differentiator is our unique pricing model,” says Voice Carrier President and CEO Gary Johnson (News - Alert). “We customize our pricing for the customer, vs. having a set of basic prices in a price list. We allow the customer to have as many extensions as needed and only charge for the concurrent or simultaneous calls [the business] signs up for.”
A key tenet to Voice Carrier’s pricing model is that it charges by the concurrent call rather than on a per-line basis. That means if a business has phones in every room, but some of those phones are rarely or never used, it doesn’t get charged for them. Rather, customers are charged based on the number of people on average on the phone at their organizations. That means Voice Carrier might charge for 10 phones instead of 20 phones, for example, and work with the customer to adjust up if that customer significantly exceeds the expected average on a regular basis.
That, paired with the benefits of hosted PBX, resulted in a winning combination for such customers as OJAS Enterprises.
“Voice Carrier Office enables us to put all our employees in the U.S., India and China on a single hosted PBX, which enables us to communicate just like everyone is working in the same office,” says Samir Patel, president of OJAS Enterprises, a high-volume import/export wholesaler. “Before Voice Carrier, we were spending hundreds of dollars every month making international phone calls, but now we just dial a three-digit extension to speak with our people anywhere in the world.”
“As my business grows, I can just add more lines,” Patel adds. “We walked away from a $30,000 on-premises PBX, but with the savings and convenience provided by the Voice Carrier hosted PBX, the conventional PBX is no match. Voice Carrier’s service has been absolutely great, and our phone bill has decreased by almost 70 percent.”
Voice Carrier’s business model also allows customers to pair an extension with multiple SIP clients. That enables employees to leverage the solution on the go using mobile devices such as iPads or smartphones. This is obviously an important feature given the workforce’s growing reliance on mobile technology to get the job done.
This is just one of the many Voice Carrier communications features that can drive productivity.
AEA Technology Inc. is among the Voice Carrier customers that is benefitting from features of the Voice Carrier solution. The designer and manufacturer of hand-held RF test instruments and time domain reflectometers uses Voice Carrier for unified communications between its offices in Carlsbad, Calif., and Lakeland, Fla.
Paul DeWinter, vice president of sales and marketing at AEA, says the company especially likes the solution’s display screen, which it finds “extremely helpful in identifying callers and capturing any missed calls for use in making directory and feature entries.” It’s easy to transfer calls between its California and Florida offices, without customers even knowing the offices are across the country from one another, he adds. AEA also uses the Voice Carrier conferencing capability to meet with its customers and distributors, and leverages the e-mail with voicemail feature to allow staff to easily keep up on messages while on the road.
New customers can get up and running with a Voice Carrier solution within 48 hours, and oftentimes in just 24 hours, adds Johnson. He says that the quick turn up time can be attributed to the fact that Voice Carrier provides preconfigured phones and PBXs.
Meanwhile, existing Voice Carrier customers that know of other organizations that might be in need of a new communications solution might want to know about the company’s new customer referral program. Through the program, current customers can benefit by introducing a friend or business acquaintance to the enterprise-grade. Once the new customer has signed up for Voice Carrier Office and has been a customer for 60 days, the referring company receives a one-time $50 credit on the next billing cycle. There is no limit to the number of referrals any customer can give.
Edited by Jennifer Russell
