Leveraging Skype for Business Communications

In just six short years Skype has grown from an Internet novelty into what is arguably the largest “phone system” in the world. Today Skype boasts over 440 million user accounts worldwide, and continues to sign up new subscribers at a rate of about 30 million per quarter. At any moment in time over 15 million users are logged on to Skype. And according to the market research firm TeleGeography, Skype carried around 33 billion international minutes in 2008 – making it the largest international voice carrier in the world, with 8% market share.

Skype began life as a consumer application. Early adopters were willing to sacrifice a little convenience and call quality for the prospect of making free international calls over the Internet.  Initially Skype caught on with international students and expats as an inexpensive way to keep in touch with friends and relatives back home. It spread like wildfire – especially in parts of the world where international calling is prohibitively expensive.

But even as Skype enjoyed widespread adoption in the consumer market, it was largely ignored by the business community. Many IT and telecom managers scoffed at Skype, and some even blocked the use of it over security concerns.

Over time Skype has evolved significantly – to the point where its features, call quality, and security capabilities now rival traditional telephony solutions. Skype is now available in just about every conceivable form-factor including desktop software; WiFi, USB and Ethernet handsets; and mobile platforms (Windows Mobile, iPhone, Blackberry). It delivers rich voice, video and text chat capabilities, and offers presence, conferencing, file sharing and other useful collaboration features.

In recent years Skype has crept into businesses at the grassroots level as employees who use Skype in their personal life started using it at work. Now more and more businesses – especially SMBs – are embracing Skype as way to reduce long distance and international calling costs. Employees use Skype to reach international customers, colleagues, and business partners, and to call back home while travelling abroad.  Many companies even publish their SkypeIDs alongside their company phone numbers on Web sites and business cards.

2008 user surveys conducted by Skype confirm more and more people are using Skype for business purposes:

• 35% of surveyed users say they use Skype for business purposes
• 20% say they make Skype video calls for business purposes
• 62% say they communicate better with customers using Skype
• 70% say they are using it while traveling on business

Until now, most businesses have treated Skype as an adjunct application – beyond the realm of the corporate phone system. An employee might use his PBX desk phone to speak to a coworker across the hall and his Skype client to speak with a colleague in China. Few companies have tried to integrate Skype with their incumbent voice equipment.

OnState is the first and only service that lets businesses leverage Skype – and all its collaborative and multimodal features – as an integral component of the corporate phone system. A cloud-based service, OnState works with various voice systems and phone networks to deliver a ubiquitous communications solution with rich network-based features.It operates with diverse PBXs and phone networks to optimize interactive communications amongst employees, customers and partners – independent of device (desk phones, softphones, mobile phones), network (PSTN, Skype, VoIP/SIP), or medium (voice, data, video). OnState lets organizations leverage Skype to extend business communications to customers, teleworkers, mobile users, and nomadic workers. Beyond just low-cost calling, OnState helps companies derive true business value from Skype.

Unlike a conventional phone system, OnState manages people and conversations – not just telephones. It uses business presence to track the availability and activity of employees wherever they are – in the office, working from home, or on the road. OnState leverages business presence to automatically connect callers to employees based on worker availability, capability, competency, spoken language or any other attributes or business rules that are germane to the organization. OnState improves customer satisfaction and enhances business efficiency by connecting customers to the person who can best serve them– on the first attempt.

With OnState you can:

• Add Internet-facing services to your incumbent PBX – without expensive hardware or software upgrades – so your employees can use Skype as an extension of the corporate phone system when working from home or the road.
• Leverage the communications and collaboration applications that best meet your specific business requirements.
• Use your published phone numbers – calls to your established phone numbers can be routed to employees who are using Skype.
• Reach 400+ million Skype users – add Skype “call me” buttons to Web pages or emails.  Deliver Skype-originated calls to your incumbent corporate phone complex.
• Use Skype as an alternative to a traditional PBX when rolling out new offices, as a platform to deliver collaboration capabilities and multimodal communications to incumbent PBX users, or as a way to eliminate costly maintenance fees by decommissioning older phone systems.
• Enhance customer communications with Skype text chat or video.
• Improve customer satisfaction and worker productivity – leverage business presence to reduce voicemail, telephone tag and call transfers, by delivering calls to the right employee on the first attempt
• Keep track of your employees wherever they are – office, home, road – whether they are reachable by Skype, a PBX or mobile phones.
• Improve outbound reach and customer engagement by tracking customer status and activity – call out to customers proactively, based on presence information.

With OnState you can use Skype to do so much more than simply reduce your phone bills. By treating Skype as an integral component of your company phone system, you can derive true business value from Skype so you can boost sales, bolster customer satisfaction and improve productivity.

Related: Skype for Business Solutions