Good points.
I used to quote an amount for the phone system after making an
assumption about the hours I would spend setting it up. I included 90
days of post sale support and after that they either had to pay a
monthly support fee or pay hourly for any changes. I figured I finally
got the numbers right when a customer told me that our "price was about
the same as the company selling an NEC phone system, but you had more
features included that NEC would have had license fees for."
My opinion, which I have not been successful in putting into practice,
is the key is not giving away labor like training, configuration,
setting up IVRs and MOH, etc. There’s a lot of ongoing changes to a
phone system, traditionally a small business would pay the “phone guy”
several hundred dollars every other month, now their office manager
does it or they pay you (or get you to do it for free).
Also not to compare AT&T or Comcast putting in an appliance to a
hosted system with support of branches and offsite employees, FW
upgrades, backups, HW replacement in case of failure, etc.
And I thought companies like AT&T and Comcast still went by the
per-line model where you could end up paying for 6 lines in a rollover
group to handle enough simultaneous calls where with VoIP you just
need the one DID.
*From:* Joe Falaschi <mailto:listm...@wi.net>
*Sent:* Tuesday, April 07, 2015 8:04 AM
*To:* af@afmug.com <mailto:af@afmug.com>
*Subject:* Re: [AFMUG] VoIP
Yea I told the ipifony guys that we cannot charge what their payback
model said to for business lines - something like $35 per handset. We
just couldn't pay back their system with the rates we have to charge.
We still charge per handset, but more around $18 each with all
features. We definitely think it's worth doing VoIP though. It makes
selling business Internet much easier for us to be able to offer a
package. Even as you say 10 extensions at $18 per, $180 plus the
Internet. Maybe it's more than Comcast when you add the Internet but
it's much more in the ballpark than if the handsets were double.
We're just starting to keep better track of stuff like this but we're
at about 50% of business accounts wanting bundled voice and the
competition's quote has it so ours has to as well.
Joe Falaschi
e-vergent
On 4/6/15 10:31 PM, George Skorup (Cyber Broadcasting) wrote:
The per extension model doesn't work anymore, as far as business
customers. Say they have 10 phones/extensions at $35/mo each. Comcast
or AT&T can come in and blow that away with $200/mo business service.
Been there, done that, cannot do that anymore.
Don't think you can just jump into doing voice. IMO, it's not worth
it at all. Too many headaches. For your own business, sure, have at it.
On 4/6/2015 9:33 PM, Ken Hohhof wrote:
You’ve got to charge for something. It has become standard practice
not to charge for minutes, even though you get charged for minutes.
So some combination of $X per DID and $Y per extension. Especially
when you are talking to businesses, they are used to paying per
“line”, where if they want to be able to have Z simultaneous
incoming or outgoing calls, they need Z lines, usually each with its
own DID but configured as a rollover or hunt group to the main
number. But with VoIP you can have as many calls as you want with
just one “line”, so you need a different model. Also, features like
voicemail and call waiting and caller ID that used to bring in tons
of money for the phone companies are now expected free as part of
standard service. So you need to charge for something. Otherwise
you end up supporting 20 or 100 handsets with unlimited local and
long distance for a total of $20 per month and you go broke. I
think the idea is that an extension is a placeholder for a bucket of
minutes, if a business or MDU has 100 extensions, they will likely
make 100 times as many calls as someone with one extension. On the
other hand, a business with 1 DID and 100 extensions probably
shouldn’t pay as much as 100 individual customers each with an
extensions and a DID, especially since you will probably pay some
small amount per month per DID for origination.
