What is SIP Trunking?

Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is a protocol used to establish voice connections over the Internet, namely using Voice of Internet Protocol (VoIP). Trunking is the unification of multiple channels into a single, unified channel linking various points to the proper receive on the opposite end. That being the case, SIP Trunking can be compared to “traditional” telephone lines.

The main difference is that all calls are translated into data, allowing them go through the data network, rather than the classic telephone networks. This means voice and data can and are transferred over the same network – namely the Internet.

With SIP trunking, in this case also referred to as call trunking, you can retain all the functions of your regular telephone services, but all calls (both national and international) are made via the Internet.

Benefits of SIP Trunking services

Switching your networks to enable the usage of offers your company a number of benefits

• Cut monthly costs up to 70%
• Call channels can be easily increased when needed
• Costs per call are much cheaper using SIP trunking services
• Free calls between your employees since it’s over your internet connection

Why choose SIP Trunking?

When it comes to the infrastructure of your calling systems, cost obviously plays a major role in the decision to switch to SIP Trunking. Not only does the switch to SIP Trunking offer simplified telecommunications channel, it also enables:

• Benefits for Convergence and Infrastructure: Rather than taxing voice and data services separately, SIP Trunking service allows companies to consolidate these on a single IP network. Meaning that if you have multiple sites that already have a data connection between them, SIP trunking allows your calls to connect over the same data connection (in most cases, anyway).
• Scalability (phone numbers): With SIP Trunking services, it becomes very easy to scale up or down in terms of capacity so your company always pays only for the numbers and call volumes you need.
• Multiple services through the same connection: Unified Communications (UC) applications for teleconferencing and e-mail, for example, can be connected through your SIP Trunk.

Let our trusted specialists help you evaluate your current situation and guide you to the perfect SIP Trunking service solution for your organisation’s needs. Contact us, today!

Like most companies, you are constantly evaluating your investments and efforts for efficacy and target reaching, right? Marketing campaigns are some of the most important places to do these types of evaluations. Too many times we focus only on evaluating website or newsletter data because it’s easily accessible and easy to analyse. However, studies show that the phone is not dead in marketing! Consumers still prefer picking up the phone to contact a company to get advice, give their opinion or ask for information.

Phone numbers are part of the marketing strategy

With that said, it’s important to remember to evaluate the success of incoming phone calls. When investing in toll free numbers, what you want is to analyse whether the toll free numbers are being used as intended and if it’s being done efficiently. This can be easily done by implementing call tracking.

You can easily run these diagnostics with our online dashboard. Our IVR landscape allows customers to view and track call statistics to do such analyses. Different functions help to analyse the call even before answering the phone, such as where the call is coming from. Here, we’ll share the many possibilities how call tracking is beneficial to your company.

Improve call centre efficiency

Prior to taking a call, a voice recording share information about the country of origin of the call, what the caller has chosen on your touch-key menu, and/or which hotline the call is coming from. Having this information is valuable for many reasons. First, it makes it possible for your team to know in which language to answer calls, perfect for multinational business dealings. Second, your team will know precisely how to help callers with the detailed information provided. This can be especially helpful for call centres receiving calls from multiple lines. 

Improve client relations

You can also improve your relationship to your existing clients. With call tracking, the caller can be identified before taking the call, allowing you to address them by name. Moreover, the client’s data can be immediately accessed in your data system as it can be coupled with the incoming calls, saving time. This kind of personalisation is priceless when it comes to customer satisfaction!

Evaluation of customer service and phone numbers

Calls can also be evaluated after they’re done. After the call, you can access statistics such as length of the call, how long the call took, how quickly it was answered, how long the caller had to wait to be answered, and if (and/or how many) calls were missed while you were on the line. 

You want to know which phone lines and products bring in the most traffic or which country the call are coming in from? Call tracking makes this possible. With access to call tracking, you can check if and where marketing campaigns are succeeding and subsequently where you should increase your marketing efforts. In case of an emergency hotline, you can also check in which countries the hotline has been called the most.

Interesting in learning about all the possibilities of call tracking and how it can increase your company’s efficiency? Contact us today!

All day long we hear commercials calling out “call us toll free!” or “contact us on our free hotline numbers”. The relationship between these different types of telephone numbers is confusing; hotline numbers can be 800 numbers, but a toll free number isn’t always a hotline number. Have we lost you yet?

The first thing to know about both types of numbers is this: They can be called at no cost to the caller.

What are toll free numbers?

In 1967, the United States saw the assignment of toll free numbers to large companies for special events with high volumes of incoming calls, to protect usual day-to-day incoming business calls. These toll free numbers were handled by dedicated in-house teams, or outsourced to call centers. Eventually, larger companies were able to select their own number instead, leading to a rise in popularity.

Substantial growth came with the introduction of easy to dial phone numbers like 1-800-555-1234, and Vanity phone numbers like 1-800- CALLNOW (1-800-225-5669). Soon enough, small and medium-sized businesses found their way to toll free numbers as well. In the early 90s, the FCC began to offer number porting: meaning that companies could keep their toll free numbers when moving or changing service providers.

Simply speaking, toll free numbers cost nothing for its user. It’s generally a 1-800 number, used as an added value service number where callers can call for free, from anywhere, and all costs are paid by the organization who is offering the service line. These lines are used as support lines to help with substantive questions and/or complaints. That’s why, when calling their toll free numbers, a lot of organizations’ Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems ask you to select a reason for calling before directing you to the right department.

What are hotline numbers?

Historically, hotlines refer to direct communication lines. Pop culture has given us the idea that a red telephone exists that could be immediately directed to important parties in times of war. Nowadays, free hotline numbers in telecoms refers to phone numbers used for large scale incoming calls, often in times of urgency, without fear of a service disruption.

These days, hotline phone numbers are commonly set up as exceptional and special events lines to connect people in need for specific information. In the case of large scale crises, like product recalls or the current COVID-19 crisis, they are set via toll free numbers. These hotline numbers ensure that a) the proper information is accessible to anyone who needs it and b) that anyone who needs to share pertinent information has a designated place to do so.

So what is the difference between toll free numbers and free hotline numbers? The difference is rooted in the amount of incoming calls an organization expects and is able to handle without service disruption.

In this installment of the sustainability series, we thought it would be interesting to take a moment to take a closer look at air travel for business purposes. In the last post, we talked about the cost of carbon dioxide emissions on the environment and how its intensity seems to be growing exponentially. Here, we thought we ought to share some of our own ideas and strategies for minimizing our carbon footprints by changing our behavior when it comes to business travel.

If it isn’t obvious already, one of the topics that really grinds our gears is that of extensive business travel. It’s true that with the globalization of the economy moving as fast as it is today, there are some instances where it might be imperative to make the plane journey to face-to-face meetings. We won’t deny that, as some of our staff have out-of-country meetings which require air travel, too. For international partnerships which require crossing the ocean, we absolutely understand that it’s just not plausible to hop on the Queen Mary II to get across the Atlantic from the East Coast.

Cut back on business travel

But hear us out on this one! Think about the number of meetings that don’t require such long and difficult distances. There are plenty of times where carpooling or a train journey can take the place of a flight. Sure, it may take longer to arrive, but these alternative forms of transport have their bonuses. Think about the time you could spend discussing the particulars for an important meeting with your colleagues, or simply just take some time out of your busy schedule to watch the world go by.

Currently, jet fuel and aviation gasoline are taxed very low, which has given the opportunity for airlines to offer lower and lower ticket prices. As such, inexpensive travel has become so integral to the way we run our business that we are so easily persuaded and addicted to traveling. An organization which promotes “a transport policy based on the principles of sustainable development” called Transport and Environment has created a briefing which suggests the possibility of a drastic increase in taxes, ticket prices would inevitably be forced to rise.

Now, for large, multinational conglomerates, such an increase in the price of travel may not make a dent in their monthly expenses. However, this could seriously damage midsize and smaller businesses who are at the core of economic growth and arguably the largest generators of today’s jobs. Even the slightest increases to their travel expenses could create major budgeting issues, and even potential collapse of their businesses. This begs us to question: Are we on the verge of yet another economic recession? Could we see our current 4% unemployment rate burst above and beyond the 10.2% we saw in 2009?

Maybe it’s not ideal or convenient to change the way we travel for business, but at the rate we are going, not only might businesses collapse under the financial pressures, but our planet, too. The less we opt for unnecessary travel, the less flights are needed per day between destinations. This means that the large amount of emissions from a large amount of flights can be drastically minimized! In case you forgot, it takes about 2106 trees to repair the damage done by a single flight from D.C. to London!

So, let’s think about those smaller, shorter trips and meetings which could be eliminated altogether. Think about the time, money, and effort that can be saved from using teleconferencing rather than traveling to and from constant meetings between national and international offices.

In this installment of our Series on Sustainability, be prepared to learn the extent to which your air travel truly impacts our planet.

While the Environmental Protection Agency’s calculations state that carbon dioxide emissions from commercial air travel is only equivalent to about 9% of the total US emissions (reports here, table 3-12), it is on the top of the list of things we can do as individuals to engage in polluting the world just a little bit less.

How many times per month do your nationwide colleagues travel for meetings? Did you know that for a round-trip flight from New York to San Francisco (about 5158 miles), 1270 lbs (or approximately 0.6 tonnes) of carbon dioxide are calculated per person through fuel combustion? If we look at a rule of thumb of 4-15 trees planted to offset 1 tonne of carbon dioxide, it takes the work of about 6 healthy adult trees for a full year per person per flight. According to Google Flights, there are up to 41 flights per day between these cities. So if there are 100 people on the flight, that’s 600 trees per flight, or 24,600 trees per day needing to be planted for this route alone!

If that’s the number for coast to coast travel, think about how much pollution is created when travelling overseas for meetings. An average intercontinental flight – let’s say from Washington, D.C., to London, UK – is a 7332 miles round-trip. Pollution wise, that’s 1563 lbs (or 0.7 tonnes) of carbon dioxide. If we do the math, you would have to plant closer to 9 trees per person to counteract the effects. Given that international flying planes are larger, let’s say there are about 234 people, that’s 2106 trees to plant per flight.

Why teleconferencing helps the environment

We simply do not have the space or resources on our tiny planet to be able to offset such drastic carbon dioxide emissions. By minimizing air travel for business, think about the amount of pollution you could avoid contributing per capita.

In order to do so, we strongly believe in the power of conference calling using our non-geographical, virtual phone numbers. Any number of people can join in on business meetings through the ease of telephony without having to leave the office, deal with jet lag, and (arguably most important) pollute our precious planet.

Get in contact today for a free quote to implement your toll-free virtual numbers so we can help you do your part in keeping our planet just a little bit safer from the effects of climate change.

As we are slowly approaching the end of the first quarter of the millennium, society is becoming increasingly aware of the impact their lives have on the state of the environment. For decades, there has been talk about the effects of the use of fossil fuels on climate change and global warming, but every solution seems to be very big and out of reach for us to be able to make any significant change.

The most well-known climate action spokesperson is Al Gore, without a doubt, who released his documentary film An Inconvenient Truth about the topic in 2006. His film was widely acclaimed and even a catalyst for a comprehensive range of positive (and unfortunately negative) responses to the climate issue. Effectively, Gore helped bring to light the realities of what humans have done to our planet over time with regards to pollution and offered ways that we, as an entire society, can make positive changes to slow down and potentially halt any further damage .

For many of us these things can seem out of reach for us to feel like we are making a difference, even if it’s something really small. Every one of us creates something called a carbon Footprint. TakePart gives a great definition of the carbon footprint as: “the amount of greenhouse gases—primarily carbon dioxide—released into the atmosphere by a particular human activity”. This means that everything we do, from the food we consume to our chosen means of travel, has some sort of effect on the amount of greenhouse gases that are dispersed into the world.

Look at the impact that human involvement has had on temperature changes. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is an international organisation founded in 1988 that looks at the facts and figures which directly and indirectly contribute to climate change and their socio-economic and environmental consequences .

Cut down on business traveling, start teleconferencing!

In their most recent summary report for policy makers, they state that the drastic increase in greenhouse gas emissions since the pre-industrial era is extremely likely to be the cause of the unanticipated and dangerous changes in climate that we have been experiencing, especially in the last two decades .

In this Series on Sustainability, we aim to give you a more detailed and accessible understanding of the state of carbon dioxide emissions in industry. Furthermore, we hope to offer helpful tips on how you can make an impact by making more educated decision about your business travel needs. We encourage you to cut down on your monthly business travel through the use of teleconferencing. Keep an eye on this space for the next installment of this series where we will break down the effects of air travel on the stated of carbon dioxide emissions.

In the meantime, do not hesitate to get in contact with us for a free quote to implement virtual numbers for all of your business’ teleconferencing needs.

A memo at Coca-Cola was released in November 2014 announcing the elimination of voicemail to “simplify the way [our employees] work and increase productivity”.   Instead of offering a voicemail service, incoming callers find themselves on the other side of an electronic message that prompts them to call back at another time, or to try contacting their target by other means of communication such as email. For Coca-Cola, the savings are $100,000 per year!

Within their organization, Coca-Cola found that the older generation of employees is fond of the voicemail services while their younger employees barely use it. With that in mind, keeping voicemail on your line at Coca-Cola is still possible, given you can prove “business critical need” – it is said that only 6% of workers chose to keep the service.

Just this past June, JPMorgan Chase & Co announced that in an attempt to cut costs they would also be cutting voicemail. With smartphones being ubiquitous in the workplace, and text messaging and emails taking over voice to voice communication, they found that voicemail was no longer useful. Before it’s dissolution at JPMorgan, already about 65% of employees had it deactivated, while some others found it to be an integral part of their personal business operations. An even more compelling case for cutting out voicemail: the company says they are able to save $10 per month per line.

Think about the smaller players

It seems quite clear that eliminating voicemail in both of these scenarios is an attempt to cut costs and prevent wasted time. But does the elimination of voicemail really save that much time? We spoke to our CEO and president Hans Lasonder about his view on voicemail and its current position in corporate America. He shared: “Through study I have learned that approximately 16 minutes are wasted per phone call received. So think about what happens if you get rid of voicemail and people start calling your general phone number – that means lots of calls going to unintended receivers all of which will lose 16 minutes out of their working day that they will not get back by answering a call that voicemail could have picked up….”.

In researching for this article, we found that a similar statistic exists for responding to emails. The question here becomes: which is the more seamless form of communication – voice or text? Lasonder believes that at the end of the day, in business, it is the personal interactions, including tone of voice, witty banter, etc., that are integral to business transactions.

Voicemail and the future

A professor at MIT says that most people don’t even listen to voicemails anyway, they just see who called and call back or send a text. The shift from voice to text seems like the natural progression as technology becomes more advanced. We asked Lasonder how he feels about this shift. He agrees that as technology changes, the market changes with it and there is an obvious push towards written communication.

Throughout our conversation, Lasonder maintained his position that voicemail still brings a personal connection which is important in business – an idea that resonates with others as well.  Moreover, Lasonder asked us to think about commuters or customers who still do not feel comfortable with writing texts or emails. For these people, it is much easier to simply dial the phone and leave a quick voice message. In other words, we need a way to connect the new text based communication with the more traditional voice based communication. Our current solution? Lasonder stands by our Voice2Mail feature. This feature sends the voicemail message as an audio file with its information to the receiver’s email, allowing them to see when they missed the call and to listen to it whenever. This feature is our way of making that connection with the voice integration Lasonder finds so important as well as a shift into the email that has become ubiquitous in the workplace.

There are of course technologies that offer voice recognition in the making – Apple has mentioned developing Siri to be able to transcribe voicemails. With these types of technologies in progress, Lasonder believes that such technologies are the future of voicemail and thus integral to the types of services our customers need. Once such a technology has been mastered, it is Lasonder’s hope that we can create an immediate translation to truly connect global business to local people.

These days it is more and more important to increase convenience, at almost any cost. One of the writers over at TechCrunch shows just how convenient (but expensive) the Dash buttons really are – showing us that the Amazon price for paper towels is double that of Walmart. Is spending double the amount of money on daily use household products really more convenient than taking an hour out of your week to do shopping?

Another of the most commonly talked about ways that the SmartHome is useful is in the powersaving technologies – motion sensor lights, remote power on/off from your smartphone, timed on/off of  central heating, etc. There are tons of technologies out there with their own apps that gather information about your household products. However, without communication between devices currently dubbed as “smart” essentially leaves the SmartHome not so smart after all – in the long run you still have to check each app separately to see what is going on with each different product. While SmartThings, Google, and Apple have infrastructures to connect their devices, they are not yet common place in the SmartHome market.

With that said, all the excitement about a connected home must be met with equal caution. Connectivity, as we’ve been hearing about quite frequently in the news recently, inevitably leads to the risk of privacy issues. A Tripwire researcher found some important flaws in current SmartHome tech that could lead to a new type of ‘smart criminal’. According to Network World, the Tripwire researcher warns that not only can these flaws allow hackers to disable security systems and unlock doors, they can also allow for access to detailed information from motion sensors and/or security cameras in the home – letting these potential criminals know exactly where homeowners are at any given time.

With the integration and interconnection of smart devices in the home, it will be interesting to see if our future continues to inch towards that of the Jetsons. Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below!

photo credit: Home automation (license)

For all intents and purposes, AI is an attempt to technologically create human intelligence to the point where a computer is able to think and resolve problems on its own. There are two types of AI: weak and strong. Weak AI refers simply to technologies that are intended only to master specific application problems. Strong AI refers to technologies that aspire to solve problems, think creatively, have a sense of consciousness and emotions.

The probability of coming into contact with weak AI is quite high – and without even being aware of it! AI is a standard tenet of a number of technologies, including search engines (like Google or Yahoo) and speech recognition tech (like Siri). As well, it is now being used in customer service with text and voice based message services.

While some may find customer service bots to be more predictable and widely available than humans during office hours, there are drawbacks. For instance, AI is not able to independently deliver creative solutions to complex problems. This type of drawback is probably the exact reason that companies are trying to create a truly intelligent technology.

In September 2014, IPsoft announced its new AI agent, Amelia. While you may not have even heard of Amelia, she has been in the works for about 15 years. Named after Amelia Earhart, Amelia does not merely mimic human behavior but actually has the ability to process information and come up with solutions for issues. Amelia has access to the same information as an employee would.

She creates mind maps and is able to connect information in a meaningful way. She only becomes smarter over time, the same way us humans do. With more information and more processing, Amelia can come up with solutions for more and more complex situations. IPsoft’s creation in Amelia allows businesses to leave the tedious research work of customer service to her, leaving space for human talent to flourish. She can even send off inquiries to human colleagues if she is unable to find a response to the question at hand.

Another interesting development in AI technology is Google’s DeepMind. Much like Amelia, DeepMind is being taught to think like we do. DeepMind is even learning how to read! MIT Technology Review shared recently that on top of facial recognition – being able to distinguish cat face from human face, for instance – an algorithm has been created to help teach DeepMind to read. While creating an image database is relatively easy, a comprehensible written word database was not so easy. Luckily, the DeepMind team has found a way to take advantage of the writing style in the DailyMail and CNN articles to create a database of over 200,000 articles. With summaries and annotations, the algorithm is able to learn more than just where and when sentences occur, but also how to interpret them.

Of course, like with any new technology, there are a number of critiques of AI in the tech and science worlds. Perhaps the most compelling argument against it comes from famed Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking. Stephen Hawking himself uses an AI device in order to communicate . A technology created by Intel and Swiftkey was developed to learn how he thinks and predict what he would like to say. While he is clearly an avid user of AI technology, he said back in December that “Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded [by more advanced AI]”.

While this line of thinking may exist for many, there is no doubting the ways in which AI can be beneficial to our everyday lives. Along with the great potential of IPsoft’s Amelia, DeepMind’s creators developers believe that AI will be an extension of humanity rather than a threat to it. In the last century, human kind has survived the Industrial Revolution and more recently a surge in Digitalization, why not the integration of AI into society?

Let us know what you think in the comment section and/or over on our Twitter (@tfusa_inc)!

The internet of things is about telecommunications. It’s key tenet is the communication between devices.

In Microsoft’s March/April 2015 issue of Chief Executive magazine, they say that IoT is really about three processes to improve business and data analysis strategies that already exist: information, knowledge, and wisdom.  First, you need the information from the particular ‘thing’ that you are interested in – data that is created and stored within the technology itself.  Then, information turned into knowledge of the problem that needs to be addressed.  Finally, this knowledge leads to gaining the wisdom needed to fix the issue and ensure it never happens again.  Maybe IoT is not as complicated as it seem… In the publication, Barb Edson, general manager, marketing, for Microsoft Cloud & Enterprise, says that it is simply “about taking a step back and understanding how you want to change your business”.  Since massive amounts of data are being generated anyway, IoT technologies will merely simplify this process.

Deloitte’s  IoT Ecosystem

Deloitte reports that “of 89 IoT implementations by 20 major providers between 2009 and 2013 revealed 65 percent of use cases were focused on cost reduction and efficiency, while 22 percent focused on risk management, with only 13 percent possibly targeting revenue growth or innovation.”  There is no surprise that the majority of IoT implementations focus on cost reduction and efficient, or that very little of the implementations target revenue growth.  However, with the incredible innovative technology available, it is quite shocking that the focus on risk management is a mere 22 percent.

Deloitte’s report makes a great case for IoT in risk management.  They focus mainly on the fact that employers, employees, and consumers alike expect a certain level of quality when it comes to telecommunications: high speed, uninterrupted, 24/7, limitless connectivity.  Especially in transportation, IoT technologies can be increasingly helpful in minimizing risk as they can send and receive information about things like driver behavior, traffic information (to manage time better), and maintenance updates.

This all sounds great, doesn’t it? Sure, but something incredibly and increasingly important in this day and age is finding a way to make sure all of these connections are as secure as possible.  This is where IoT has come into problems in the beginnings of its inception.

Hewitt-Packard Internet of Things Research Study

A recent study done by HP uncovers the threats to security that exist within IoT technologies that need to be improved over time, before their implementation.

An HP Internet of Things study looked into the 10 most popular devices in some of the most common IoT niches (such as TVs and home alarms).  Of their findings we found the following to be the most interesting:

• They found that an astounding 90% of these devices collected at least 1 piece of personal information.
• Eighty percent of devices had no sophisticated password requirements, allowing combinations such as ‘1234’ to be accepted as a password.
• Seventy percent of devices did not use encrypted networks, which is especially important in the transport of sensitive information.

With the amount of information being sent over these systems, including things as sensitive as bank information and social security numbers, it is astounding that such privacy concerns exist.  Regardless of this ‘doom-and-gloom’ look at IoT devices, HP offers three solid calls to action for the manufacturers of IoT devices: “(1) Conduct a security review of your device and all associated components, (2) Implement security standards that all devices must meet before production, and (3) Ensuring security is a consideration throughout the product lifecycle”.

What do you think? Have you had enough? Let us know what you’d like to see on the blog by leaving us a comment below!