Office Telephone – How to Reduce your Monthly Costs

Finding ways to reduce overhead cost without compromising the business is the aim of almost all business owners especially with today’s economic problems. Monthly bills are a business killer and often times office telephone bills are on the top end of the pile. However, you cannot just trash it away because communication is essential for any business to succeed. To help reduce your burden here are some friendly tips on how to reduce your phone bills.

Choosing a phone plan – Office telephone systems often have two plans to choose from the untimed and timed plans. Do some creative calculations using your old bill and take an average on how long your calls last. For an instance, the plans to choose from are timed 3 cents per minute and untimed 10 cents per call, if your calls last about 1 to 2 minutes then you are better off with the timed plan, on the other hand if your calls last more than 4 minutes then the untimed rate is best for you.

Minimizing line rentals – Most businesses have more line than they need, you can reduce your cost by disconnecting unnecessary lines out of your service. However, just make sure that the lines and or numbers that you will remove is really not used for anything like, fax, EFTPOS, security, Internet and so on. Your office telephone service provider or your IT department should be able to tell you this.

Using a SIP line – SIP is a communication protocol from VoIP, if you do not want to use VoIP 100% then you can use it to make outgoing calls. This will significantly reduce your phone call charges by as much as 70%. A SIP line can easily be integrated to almost any IP PBX and can be programmed to automatically switch on if you place an outgoing call or by punching in an override code before dialing the number you wish to call.

Switching providers – If you current provider does not give you the room for options to reduce cost then you might want to consider replacing them. There are numerous telecommunications provider in the market today that offers very competitive rates. Shop around and find the best possible deal for your business, however, you must be very careful as cheap and quality does not always coincide with each other. It is advisable that you request for a trial period to test the overall quality of the system and lines before signing up with a new provider.

Consider using other solutions – We have different modes of communication today thanks to the continuous evolution of technology. We have email, SMS, VoIP and instant messaging. Conduct a survey and or research on how you can capitalize on these solutions to remedy your expensive phone bills.