We have always promoted the idea of trying out VoIP rather than diving right in. A recent article “5 Costs Associated with VoIP Onboarding (bit.ly/1Mgonyn) dealt with just this issue. It highlighted the importance of understanding the costs associated with VoIP deployment so there are no unexpected hits to the telecommunication budget. The five points it stressed are:
- Hardware;
- Telecom Expense Management;
- Software Licensing;
- Training; and
- Productivity Loss.
Anyone who has reviewed the promotional material relating to the Portico™ TVA™ have seen three of the above issues stressed a great deal. It is good to see an outside source mentioning the same points. So many people tend to gloss over what can be exceptionally high and sometimes overwhelming costs. As productivity loss and to a lesser extent, training, are intangible costs they are ignored much too often.
The writer states that unless a user goes with a hosted solution and softphones there is always going to be a capital cost. As the writer also notes many firms opt to keep a physical handset as an option. The question is how to manage that cost and everything that entails. When you add in training costs and productivity loss this almost shouts out for the introduction of the Portico™ TVA™. If companies retain their legacy handsets and only slowly introduce new services they are able to keep their upfront costs to a minimum. In many instances training is not even required at the outset as their legacy handsets can be programmed so that they operate on the VoIP platform in the same way they had before. As there is no need to re-cable the operation to handle IP phones and as far as the end user is concerned nothing is changed productivity losses are negligible. What a great way to get the true benefits of IP telephony without many of the costs normally associated with onboarding.