Insider Telecom Updates Every Customer Should Know

Good day, valued customer!

I hope you are doing well! We sincerely appreciate your patronage, that’s why we always try to improve our services to better serve you.

Because of that...

There are some important updates about Insider Telecom that you must know. They are quite important and may even be of help to find more ways to improve your business. We recommend that you at least go over the topics and see if there’s anything you can relate with.

Here is a list of topics we think you should know about:

Insider Telecom is moving to a more modern technology!

a. As some of you are already aware, we are happy to formally announce that we are moving to a more modern platform that includes many new features:

i. Text translation of emails

ii. Video conferencing

iii. Instant Messenger

iv. Significant control over your forwarding of numbers via a web-based control panel

v. Several powerful features under the hood to improve reliability.

vi. Membership in an ever-growing national community list of illegal telemarketing phone numbers which our system will now block.

b. Customers are being moved over a few at a time and on their schedule. If you have not already spoken with us about it, we will be contacting you to schedule a time to switch you over to the new system.

c. Your existing feature set remains the same, and your pricing remains the same for those features. There are some optional advanced features that available for a small fee.

New billing options

a. If you are interested in monthly, or even yearly billing, those options are available for our customers paying via credit card and signing up for automatic payments.

b. Just let us know and we’ll help you choose the billing option that works best for your situation.

More phone options

a. For people who are looking for phones with additional quick keys and status lights, we’re happy to offer a 10-button version of our Grandstream phone.

b. Need a desk phone but hate being tied down to one spot because of limited wired connectivity? We now have a WiFi enabled desk phone that can used where running Ethernet would be troublesome.

c. Grandstream now has a reliable and inexpensive DECT cordless phone we have seen used successfully on a number of installations.

d. If you’re using your smartphone as for taking work calls, you can now install the new softphone application. This can ring separately from your cell phone, allowing separation from your work and personal calls.

e. We now have a WiFi enabled phone for locations that are difficult to wire for ethernet.  For instance, a host station in a restaurant, behind a bar, or at the far end of a warehouse.

Some new communication options:

a. We will no longer be sending out emails about system features and such.

b. You can follow us on Facebook 

c. Follow us on LinkedIn 

d. Or bookmark and constantly visit our blog for more tips, tidbits, and updates!

Referral fee for new clients

a. A $250 referral fee will be provided as a credit or direct payment to an individual for any system of 5 users or more that signs up and remains with us for at least 6 months.

b. We are actively marketing and growing Insider Telecom. New customers help us keep your prices low due to the high level of fixed costs in this business. Please send ‘em our way!

Insider Telecom is in its 8th year of operation and we are constantly incorporating new innovations!

Thanks for being our customer! Looking forward to more years of fruitful partnership with you!

XO

Chuck

Types of Phone Users

General office phone user

These users make a few calls a day, often to a group of vendors or users from a customer list.

They know how to use web-based business management software to keep track of contact information, support requests, and order tracking.

The new 3CX software and Grandstream phone can make this work easier in a number of ways.

Using the web console, the user can change forwarding settings. For instance, they are waiting for an important call that simply CANNOT go to voicemail. They can enable simultaneous ringing with their cell phone, or just forward calls to their cell phone until they are ready to put things back to normal operations.

Of course having the call ring to their cell phones all the time, or just during business hours is also an option.

Work from home user

3CX and the GXP2135 phone allow the users extension to ring in multiple locations at the same time, so whether they are at their desk in the office, or at the desk in the home office, their environment has all the same features and benefits.

If it is more convenient to simply use their computer as their phone, the 3CX web app supports that without requiring the installation of any additional software.  We have a Google Chrome add on that allows users to use click to dial through their browser as well.

The home user has the option to use the system however they find most efficient.  Bluetooth heads are supported directly by the phone, or they can use it to connect to their computer and skip the phone entirely.  Since extensions can ring at multiple locations at the same time, they can use as many of these options at the same time as they wish.

Work-on-the-road user

3CX provides an excellent quality soft phone application for iPhone and Android that allows the road warrior to receive high detailed caller ID and transfer calls as if they were in the office.  Also, calls logged through the system can be imported into a CRM since the soft phone acts as an extension of the PBX just like any other.

After-hours, tech support or on call user

Setting aside an extension for tech support, a cell phone can be assigned to weekend or evening duty easily through the web interface.  Calls can be routed to a ring group during the day and then forwarded to the cell phone of the person on call after hours.

Live Operator ability

The Grandstream GXP2170

This phone can easily be used as a rock-solid console without taking up all the space on the desk. Its 12 BLF keys show status of all your busiest extensions.  But using the virtual key system you can click through to see that status of 36 extensions without any additional hardware clogging up the work environment.  The phones support single click transfers for easy error free transitions.

For companies that need the extra keys, multiple side cars are available.

Honestly, this can be a little over the top for most businesses, but for a very busy company with a live receptionist, it can save time and improve work flow for the whole office.

The Call Center

Call Centers are well-supported with phones that not only provide login and log out keys right on the phone, but also the hot desking feature. This way, employees can have their own personal greeting and extension that moves with them at any station in the company.

With powerful queuing features like 12 different hunt strategies, an automated call back feature, SLA time breach notification, configurable on hold music, introduction prompt, statistics reports generated on a daily or weekly schedule, automatic call recording notification, and just a bunch of other great features list whisper and barge in, this technology is ready for any small call center or if you want a reason for your unorganized group to become a more organized call center.

The system queue status screen provides real time feedback of queue status

The wall board provides real time statistics

Retail counter

Retail counters tend to be a set of phones shared by a number of employees trying to serve many clients at the same time, both face to face and by telephone.  The park feature comes in very handy here, being able to press a key and hold a caller, while allowing anyone at the counter to simply press the blinking light to continue serving that customer, is a must have.

We also find that having a cordless phone to bring around a showroom or back into an inventory space, including in the general ring group, allows a staff member to take calls with them when they need to leave the sales floor to check on details of an order.

Groups and departments

Most companies that are a certain size use an internal instant messenger system and have routine web video conference calls.  Our product provides a system for this, integrated with the phone system for ease of use.  The call can be scheduled from the 3CX web interface by any user and users will see these schedules show up on their Google calendar for a web meeting.

Once you start using this feature to communicate with internal staff and customers, the ability to see the status of other staff and single click to start a call or web meeting becomes second nature.

A group like this may also be a combination of many of the above user types and having all the features available creates a very powerful communication tool for any business.

Single Entrepreneur

Use our soft phone application to help differentiate between business calls and personal calls.  You can set a schedule to send calls after hours to voicemail, or have a "press 1 if this is an emergency" option to allow callers to contact you, but notify them at the same time that you are not available for general information until business hours resume.  This tool can also require callers to identify themselves before the call is sent to you, which can help stop robocalls.

Want to learn more? Contact us today!

Why that phone?

Yes, we have chosen a phone for you.

This is because we know phones. We have to maintain it and we have to help you understand it. We can confidently guarantee that what we recommend will provide you with a modern set of features that keep your business communications competitive.

We chose Grandstream because they are not afraid to innovate and they work very well with our 3CX hosted systems.

Perfect synergy: Finding phones that work well with our 3CX hosted systems

To be perfectly blunt, we were originally drawn to Grandstream at a time when VoIP phones were astronomically priced and there was very little competition.

Polycom owned the market and behaved like it. It was difficult to get technical support and the phones were unnecessarily complex, both for users and for technical support working provisioning. Cisco was the other primary player and they held the same mindset of the times. Knowledge was power and they were going to hang on to every last bit of it.

These two companies dominated the market and kept small business from having price competitive access to big business communication tools.

Seeing an opportunity, a couple of companies jumped into the market, Yealink, and Grandstream come to mind.

Yealink quickly got a reputation for higher quality phones than Grandstream. Their pricing showed this and so a battle began. Grandstream kept trying to develop phones at very low prices quickly, while battling with an ever-changing VoIP technology landscape.

Feature-packed: Bells, whistles, and more

We had our highs and lows with Grandstream, but this only helped us pinpoint areas for improvement if we aim to provide the best service possible. Only in the last few years have we seen a reliable and innovative offering at a reasonable price.

Our choice, the GXP2135 office desk phone. A clever phone at a fair price.

The phone has all the basic bells and whistles you expect, and a bunch you wouldn't. The OpenVPN client built into the phones give us the ability to address some very complex issues on a client network, where needed.

The phone also has an innovation we have yet to see anywhere else – a virtual key system that allows the phones to be programmed with dozens of key sets that can be scrolled through to host tons of features at the fingertip, while not dominating the desktop. The folks at Grandstream surely know how to innovate.

Grandstream has added a number of other products to their list: a WiFi enabled phone for desks that are not connected to Ethernet, cordless phones and their own line of PBX's.

We continue to explore these offerings, but for now the GXP21xx series gets it done.

Want to learn more? Don't hesitate to contact us here.

Communications on the move

Small business people are on the go...all the time. But there’s really no other way to do it—it takes a lot of legwork to find more opportunities for your business.

That’s why balancing life and business can be tricky.  It’s common to see entrepreneurs wanting up-to-the-minute contact with clients during business hours, but placing business on hold after hours so that their home life is unencumbered by the daily grind.

Jump into web meetings from iPhone or Android 

This impressive duality makes us want to root for every small business owner out there. This is why we also aim to provide them the tools that would help them run their business while keeping their personal lives intact.

Insider Telecom's 3CX product handles this seamlessly and effortlessly at a varying level of technical complexity.  Even the Luddite in the crowd can have a seamless transition between work and play, without ever pressing a key on any device.

We have the ability to set a forwarding and ringing schedule for your day, so when the day is done, your cell phone transitions into a tool for family communication, where only the most urgent of calls, or none at all, are let through.

If you are even slightly technical, you’d be glad to know that we also have a very tightly integrated smart phone application that allows you to carry work with you wherever you go.

You can jump into web meetings right from your iPhone or Android device.  Your business contacts are automatically synchronized on the smart phone app as well.  Press a single button or use 3 digit dialing to contact office mates as if you were there.

Even if you are a work at home type, we still have you covered.

We have a web interface that allows you to combine instant messenger, contact lists, call logs, view and listen to voicemail, and schedule video conferences all in one place.

Connect to your business from anywhere using familiar interface

Pushing the envelope even further, Insider Telecom also provides very tight integration and hosting of vTiger CRM, the most flexible and configurable software for sale, project management, and ticketing we have ever seen.

So, whether you are sitting at your desk, or out and about, basically anywhere, you can connect to your business and experience a familiar interface for communicating with your staff and clients.

Want to have a life after the 9 to 5?  Insider Telecom, as always, has your back.

Kryptonite for spam and robo calls

This morning I was pulled out of bed by a call from some place in New York I was not familiar with.  My mobile phone indicated that it was probably a spam call.  My curiosity took over and I took the call anyway.  After the customary silence the system began to play me a recorded message, in Chinese. 

Yep, that is where we are now. 

Our phone numbers are going to lists with such a thin tangential relationship to the original source; that Chinese companies call to sell me stuff I am sure I don't want, using a language I don't speak.

Price for Protection

In the business world, we have a tool that can protect us from this, the automated attendant.

"If you would like sell our CEO something he doesn't want using a language he doesn't speak, press 1", is an option you will never hear. 

In fact, it really doesn't matter what options you present to the spammer, they are most likely not going to be able to process or respond in any way that makes sense to your guardian-like automated attendant--if you set them up right.

In the middle of something: Isn't it annoying that you get spam calls when you're doing something important?

  

We can help you do that, of course, but what about calls that go to your mobile phone?  Is there anything that can be done if your phone number gets out there and calls start coming in? 

The answer is yes, but the options vary by the technology you use for cell service.

There Are Ways to Opt Out

  

Always start here, the National Do Not Call Registry.  It takes 10 seconds to register your phone number and you are added to the registry.  Reputable companies that operate in the US will use this database to make sure they are not calling you.  Won't stop the bad guys but it does help.

  

The iPhone has a feature that allows 3rd party applications to block calls that are listed in a database.  Apple provides a tool for managing a list of those software coordinating as many different tools you want to install for this purpose.

Please don't call me: Register your phone number to the National Do Not Call Registry

  

If you happen to be a Verizon customer, there is not a feature the carrier has not figured out to monetize--robo calls are no exception. 

You can enable a feature on your Verizon phone that connects you to yet another database and will also make a guess if a call is spam, and let you know in the call screen before you take the call.  There is a watered down free version and a monthly fee version.

 

So far I have not seen a significant difference in the value they provide.

Let's do something about it: Finding ways to address the robo call epidemic

  

This USA Today article goes into more depth about robocalls and the lengths some people go to stop them. It’s a great read if you’re interested to learn more tips on how to address this problem.

We Are Here to Help

  

Our technology has a feature that allows us to force the caller to say their name prior to sending the call to your cell phone or forwarded number.  This is for those cases when you are on vacation and have your extension forwarded to your cell phone. 

In this case, you hear the person's name before they are connected and you can decide to send them to voicemail without taking the call.  This works for spam and other unwanted calls.

Depending on the service level with us, we can set this up for you, or you may have the option of doing it yourself via the web portal for your extension.  Either way, it is a clever way to stop the bad guys and as always, we got your back.


If you would like to talk to us about how we can help update your business phone service and business phone system, visit us here.

Business phone service via your computer - Is it for you?

You've probably used your personal mobile phone to make and take business-related calls. But have you ever tried doing so using your desktop computer?

There is an ever-increasing overlap between the use of desk phones, cell phones, and computers for business communication.  Features like, text messaging, instant messenger, video conferencing, VoIP for business via your computer, and VoIP networking via WiFi for smart phones have been cross-pollinating for years.

More features, better service?

When the number of features are multiplied by the various mediums, you get a very powerful and complex system with some very strange limitations.  Not all mediums were originally designed to handle the nuance of all of the desired features.  Weird limitations crop up and things get complicated very quickly.

Consider this: many customers ask why they can't use their desk phone to send text messages.  As a business phone service provider we know that some desk phones can actually do this, however they are still limited to the 10-key keypad for text message entry, which we know is not fun.  These phones are more expensive, thanks to modern components like the HD touch screen, proprietary operating systems, and expensive software.

Not-so-smart phone: desk phones are still good for business, but they can limit your productivity.

We also know that most users that need to send text messages have access to a computer, so shouldn't we provide that service on the computer?  Big screen for seeing audit trails of texts and big keypad for easy data entry. Let's not forget: cut and paste.

Finding alternatives to the traditional phone

As a backup, using your cell phone makes more sense for small volume cases, as it is much more portable and the limits of screen size and keyboard key count have good workarounds that have developed over decades of use.  Cell phones are really the driving force of text messaging.  Personally I am still using text messaging via cell phone where needed, though our advanced products text messaging through vTiger CRM for sales and support communications.

What about using my computer as a phone?

Yes, that is viable and our service supports this.  When you move to the computer as your primary telephone communication tool there are a couple of things you might miss.  One, the handset is something that we have been using in business all our life and it really does it's job very well.  Telephones have excellent microphone technology designed to work with the telecom network.

"Desk phones have one job and tend to do them tirelessly with little inconsistency."

But what about a headset?  Doesn't that address the issue of the handset?

Yes and no.

The beauty of the handset is that it is a wired device, meaning high reliability, that has a somewhat convenient retracting nature, not usually found in a wired headset. It also tends to be multi-drop-on-the-floor tested. Again, this has a work around, but the handset doesn't need one.

Well, what about a wireless headset?  Also, not a bad thought, but if you have used wireless headsets, you know they have some weird limitations.  If you pick wisely and understand the limitations, like battery life, remembering where you set it down, and knowing exactly what position you can't stand in because you start to get choppy service, it can be a winner.  On the other hand, our phones have blue tooth integration, so if you like that you can go with it either via the computer or the desktop telephone.

Make the most out of your desktop computer

So now let me ask you a question, is your computer ever slow?  Ever have moments where it seems like it is locked up?  How would that go over on a call with a client?  Desk phones have one job and tend to do them tirelessly with little inconsistency.  Just having your computer decide to begin downloading MS operating system updates could disrupt a call on some machines.  Having a tech support team in your office that can configure your computers for softphone level reliability could be a minimum requirement to go, no desk phone.

Geared for productivity: a great communications suite lets you take calls on most devices--desktop PCs, mobile devices, wired phones.

Personally, I have web conference calls all the time on my computer and they are generally just fine.  I don't use a headset so things are a little simpler.  I still use my office desk phone for actual phone calls, but to be honest I am not sure if it is just habit or simpler.  With our service, you can have your desk phone, computer soft phone, and cell phone ring at the same time, and choose for yourself.

I could go on and on about how things can be different, but the simple fact is that each case is different.  Literally each application in your office has different requirements, so true what you believe is going to work best and then adapt.  We have your back!

Welcome to Our New Blog

Welcome to the new Insider Telecom LLC training and new blog!

Join us as we embark on an exciting journey to educate more and more people about VoIP, business phone systems, and the advantages of choosing Insider Telecom as the main communication system for your organization.

This blog is your source for detailed descriptions of the features of your Insider Telecom phone service.

We have been moving our backend technology to a new phone switch: 3CX.  This is a very modern hosting platform that allows customers to have their own PBX in the cloud, without having to manage or understand ANY OF IT!

This modern phone system opens up new avenues of communication for you and your teams. It comes packed full of useful features, you can't learn them all in a single training session!

Don't worry, you won't be overwhelmed. Through this blog, we are going to give you highlights and in-depth learning opportunities. Out bite-sized chunks of information will get you up and running in no time at all. We've prioritized our lessons by the most common and least used features, or by your request through this blog's comments section, or through our official Facebook page.

Want to learn more? Just ask us here and we'll make sure to give you all the details!