Cisilion’s client is saving more than $2.5m a year using Skype For Business
Oh Yes! Conference calls… The “marmite of our modern workplace”, the thing we spend hours a week doing, the best and cost effective meting experience ever! Or are they? We’ve all likely spent hours of our lives dialling into them and I’m sure by now you have all see this YouTube video that provides a great comedy highlight of the annoyances.
The Biggest Frustration Should be Cost
In the video, which focusses on peoples inability to run or join a dial-in conference call, the biggest frustration is ignored. The Cost.
For Finance Directors or CFO’s, the cost of setting up and hosting these calls can be massive and can easily run into the tens, if not hundreds of thousands of pounds each year – and that’s just for the known costs (the cost of the “known” service).
This gets worse when departments set up their own conferencing accounts on other “free” providers – the true cost being lost in a blur over priced, often premium rate PSTN dial-in numbers.
A Better Way is Born
With rise of more and more cloud hosted VoIP and conferencing services, Skype for Business being just one example, it’s easier than ever to eradicate the majority of these costs as businesses globally can now connect (we call this federation) with each other quickly, easily and security and easily host conference calls without the need to “dial-in”. All for free – yes free.
Of course, there are still times, when there is a need for some people to use a phone to dial in to a conference; for example when they’re on the road or without a WiFi connection, but even then, Microsoft’s PSTN Conferencing plans can save businesses big – what’s more most* businesses are already licensed for Skype for Business in some capacity so it’s often a case of just consuming it.
Meet Skype For Business and PSTN Conferencing
From less than £1.50 per user per month, The PSTN Conferencing add-on for Skype for Business Online (part of Office 365), allows businesses to pay a flat-rate per user to give them unlimited (ok so subject to fair use policy and all that) dial-in conferencing on top of their Skype for Business Service.
One of our customer’s is seeing savings of over $2.5m a year by moving to Skype for Business PSTN Conferencing.
Provided by Microsoft, the PSTN-Conferencing add-on provides geo-dialling across more than 90 countries. Financially, this significantly simplifies the entire process for setting up, hosting and paying for calls – it becomes as simple as clicking a button in Outlook, or your mobile app to set up, and to join and conference. Plus of course, you get the benefit of using the new Skype Broadcast Services allowing live broadcasts to up to 10,000 people!
Just “How Low Can You Go”
So of course, the savings vary business to business, but for most (assuming you have say 1,000 users), savings of £500,000 or more over 3 years are easily possible. Just do the math! For example one of our customer’s is now seeing savings of over $2.5m a year by moving to Skype for Business Conferencing alone – by replacing their plethora of non-integrated so-called “premium” conferencing platforms!
We are scheduling a series of Skype Broadcast webinars coming up over the next few weeks that will go into some of the new service updates in Office 365. These will not only the expanded voice capabilities, but will dive into security and data insights as well.
Please Register here if you’d like to attend.
Rob Quickenden, Chief Strategy Officer at Cisilion