VoIP in the Cloud and Cost-Analysis

An overwhelming majority of companies in a recent survey said that they are pursuing a cloud adoption strategy with the primary goals of improving IT efficiencies and reducing costs. According to a Dimensional Research survey, 92 percent of those surveyed said that cloud—be it private, third-party private, public or hybrid models—is a strategic initiative going forward in order to help their businesses run more effectively from an operational standpoint. That’s not to say that they haven’t embraced the cloud already. More than one third of those surveyed have a quarter or more of all services in that model. Interestingly, a full 72 percent of respondents indicated that tracking cloud usage and costs is extremely or very important to their IT function. Respondents’ top features on that wish-list include: Improve IT forecasting (57 percent), expand on-demand/self-service access to the cloud (34 percent), and the ability to better match allocation vs. utilization (30 percent). Star2Star’s scalable cloud communications platform offers flexible functionality and a variety of service options, allowing companies to use the communications features they need without having to pay for those they don’t. Executives have different communications needs than secretaries, and secretaries have different communications needs than the sales force. Star2Star’s system can provide different telephones with different capabilities so every employee has the tools needed to get their job done efficiently and cost-effectively.
AccuVoIP Services. Contact http://www.accuvoipservices.com/ at 262-649-1097 They’ll analyze your current situation and expenses and show you exactly how much money you’ll save with Star2Star. In most cases, you can even keep your old phone numbers.

VoIP Phones Systems are best for Multi Location Dealership

Gurley Leep is a household name in the Greater Indiana region. The auto dealership operates ten separate locations and specializes in variety. Mercedes-Benz, GMC, Volkswagen, Buick, commercial trucks, pre-owned vehicles are all part of of their inventory.
Like most dealerships, Gurley has a main office on each lot along with a service department, and runs its business every day, meaning that salespeople and repair persons are often “on-call.” The customer service operation relies on queuing and scheduling appointments and must also juggle walk-ins, or “drive-ins” as the case may be. Because it needs to send out loan documents and insurance papers, reliable faxing is a must for regulatory compliance.
Until recently, Brandon was struggling along with an analog telephone system that provided very limited, basic functionality. Workers relied on multiple calls and ad-hoc communications to make sure everyone was where they were supposed to be, and there was no appropriate way to track things other than by spreadsheets and manual processes. It was complex, messy, and inefficient.
Even worse, the system was also starting to break down, making maintenance a big headache for the company.
“One night we stayed out here until four in the morning fixing the problem,” said Brandon, Gurley's sales and service manager and IT manager. “We had no choice. Our phones are our lifeblood.”
AccuVoIP Services, Brandon's trusted communications vendor for 3 years, recommended making the switch to Star2Star’s Scalable Cloud Communications platform, which supports a unified approach to calling, faxing, mobile support, advanced collaboration features, and more.
For instance, the advanced presence management capabilities of the Star2Star system have revolutionized how the company handles calls. “StarScope 2 is critical. All the receptionists and cashiers, service and sales coordinators, anyone who answers the phones depends on it,” explained Brandon. “We use Call Park specifically a lot. We can keep track of everyone on the system, which was impossible to do before. It’s really become a necessity, and it works really well. If we didn’t have that anymore, the staff would go nuts.”
Other productivity-boosters include Star2Star’s mobile app, StarPhone for iPhone, StarFax Personal, ring groups and call queues.
“It’s easy to configure ring groups and call queues, and very flexible as to different things you can do. I’ve got all sorts of craziness with rollovers and groups,” Cox said. “[Setting up ring groups and call queues] is much easier than any other system I’ve ever worked with.” The system is also configured for Find Me - Follow Me, so incoming calls ring to both cell phone and desk phone simultaneously.
“We hit them both at the same time. That’s really nice, and it works really well. It fits the environment here,” Brandon concluded.
AccuVoIP Services. Contact http://www.accuvoipservices.com/ at 262-649-1097 They’ll analyze your current situation and expenses and show you exactly how much money you’ll save with Star2Star. In most cases, you can even keep your old phone numbers.

New VoIP Phone Systems are A Critical Workflow Enabler For The Always-On Generation

Despite the good reliability record of the U.S. power grid, a catastrophic power outage is not out of the question. Some experts have expressed surprise that such an event hasn’t occurred yet. Most outages are the direct result of weather-related events restricted to certain regions—such as Hurricane Sandy in the Northeast—but that doesn’t mean a disaster is not within striking distance of your business.
Much has been made of the so-called Millennial demographic—those young people born between 1980 and 2000. The 25 and under cohort is just entering the workforce, but they will likely change telecom as we know it—paving the way for ubiquitous unified communications (UC) that rely on mobility as a key pillar.
Millennials will make up 50% of the workforce in less than five years, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. By 2030, they’ll represent three-quarters of it. And UC will be a critical workflow enabler for this always-on generation.
Having grown up with access to connected, always-on everything, including mobile phones, instant messaging and text messaging, entertainment, and more, Millennials expect a seamless communications and content experience as they migrate across devices. And these expectations must be integrated into the workplace to enable optimized productivity.
Mobility will be a big part of this. The latest Gallup poll shows that smartphones are our near-constant companions. A full 81 percent of smartphone users say they keep their phone near them "almost all the time during waking hours." Smartphone attachment peaks in younger demographics. The survey found that more than 7 in 10 young smartphone owners check their device a few times an hour or more often, including 22 percent who admit to checking it every few minutes.
That contrasts with the 21 percent of smartphone owners who are aged 65 and older who check it a few times an hour or more, with a miniscule 3 percent of that older age group checking it every few minutes.
The use of mobility as an enabling reality for business functions of all kinds—be it checking email or downloading critical files with sensitive company information—will only grow in importance as this group takes its place in the workforce.
Most of all, younger employees expect to have the ability to work flexibly—and from pretty much any location. Businesses that fail to recognize this risk losing employees and missing out on new talent. At the same time, organizations need a way to maintain IT control, run analytics on employee workflow, and enforce corporate policy and security approaches.
UC is the perfect path to developing this kind of functionality, which can be embraced by both the employer and the employee.
The opportunity for channel partners is to be able to help organizations large and small to successfully migrate to modern UC solutions that incorporate mobility and a range of ancillary applications. It’s a shift from the traditional telecom infrastructure approach, to be sure—but the sooner businesses understand that such a change is inevitable, the better position they’ll be in to maintain their competitive position when it comes to hiring the best and brightest in their fields.
AccuVoIP Services. Contact http://www.accuvoipservices.com/ at 262-649-1097 They’ll analyze your current situation and expenses and show you exactly how much money you’ll save with Star2Star. In most cases, you can even keep your old phone numbers.

Does Your VoIP Phone System Keep Phone Calls Coming in During Temporary Outages?

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Despite the good reliability record of the U.S. power grid, a catastrophic power outage is not out of the question. Some experts have expressed surprise that such an event hasn’t occurred yet. Most outages are the direct result of weather-related events restricted to certain regions—such as Hurricane Sandy in the Northeast—but that doesn’t mean a disaster is not within striking distance of your business.
Our country’s reliance for electricity is supported by an energy grid comprised of 160,000 high-voltage lines, 5 million miles of distribution lines, thousands of generators and transformers, and tens of thousands of additional pieces of equipment. According to the Wall Street Journal, a devastating power outage is not just possible, it’s likely.
Losing the capability to communicate with your customers would be a serious blow to your business, both in terms of reputation and dollars. How do you safeguard your business against the possible onslaught of damage that downtime represents—especially when weather is just the tip of the iceberg (think terrorism and hackers)?
You need to make every reasonable attempt to ensure that your organization’s communications system never becomes compromised. To do that, you will need to start evaluating systems that boast redundancy and high reliability, such as Star2Star’s unified communications (UC) solution.
Scalable cloud communications from Star2Star guarantee 99.999 percent uptime reliability for your business calls, providing 100 percent uptime since 2011. With the Star2Star system, you receive not only remarkable reliability but a comprehensive package of cloud-based UC features including voice, video, messaging, conferencing, fax, presence management, and more.
Because the system combines both on-premises equipment and a suite of cloud-based services, it resolves the respective “problems” of each approach. For example, on-premises hardware invites potential service downtime as it is susceptible to even local power disruptions. Completely hosted communication solutions encompass a lack of control for the organization.
Star2Star’s on-premises hardware— the StarBox Cloud Connection Manager—takes the place of a typical edge device to provide our quality of service and call control. It connects over the Internet to Star2Star’s nationwide network of call routing nodes and data centers, constantly amassing data about the operation of each node and the Internet traffic surrounding each node, to determine best options for call routing—resulting in optimal audio on every call.
Our cloud-based services are hosted at data centers in highly secure facilities with redundant power, redundant Internet connectivity, and strict security measures. Monitoring goes on nonstop, so that the services can adjust to variable conditions. If a problem arises, you will be notified promptly. The help desk operates 24/7/365.
Here are the additional ways Star2Star works to keep your business connected:

• Failover: In the event that a problem is detected with a circuit, services are set up to switch among multiple Internet circuits at your facility. Redundant, high-speed fiber connections to the Internet are distributed among eight major points of presence and two data centers to provide stellar continuity.

• Next-day replacement parts: The StarBox CCM operating software runs via flash or solid-state disk memory without any moving parts, so unexpected system failure from wear and tear is prevented. At no additional cost, you can have any broken component replaced, including phones, within 24 hours.

• Disaster recovery: Regardless of the reason, if you experience an outage, the StarRecovery system will instantly detect the problem and automatically take over. Your calls will be rerouted to designated employee cell phones, landlines, or other office locations.

Don’t risk your business communications for another minute when a Star2Star solution is at your fingertips.
Switching to Star2Star is easy. Just contact your Star2Star re-seller at AccuVoIP Services. Contact http://www.accuvoipservices.com/ at 262-649-1097 They’ll analyze your current situation and expenses and show you exactly how much money you’ll save with Star2Star. In most cases, you can even keep your old phone numbers.

Why Larger Enterprises Are Embracing the Cloud and Converged Unified Communications

As businesses grow and expand domestically and internationally, they need a sophisticated way to manage their communications and collaboration. Cloud-based unified communications provides big savings in calling costs—important for large-scale enterprises—and provides geographic flexibility while boosting business productivity. What’s not to like? The global unified communication market is expected to reach $75.81 billion by 2020,according to Grand View Research. Enterprises emerged as the largest application segment for UC in 2013--2014 and are expected to continue dominating the market over the next six years as they continue to deploy the necessary IP infrastructure to support unified communications. Grand View said that the increase in mobile workforce as well as enterprise mobility is expected to favorably impact the global market over the next six years as growing demand and proliferation of smartphones continues. In fact, increasing adoption of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) initiatives by large enterprises is a driving force for the industry. There are vertical-specific applications to consider (i.e., the adoption of an effective UC system in the government sector aids in operational continuity, emergency response, and situational awareness), but Marlin Financing points out that UC’s ability to unite communications platforms around the office can boost productivity and improve customer and partner satisfaction for any large enterprise, especially those that may have multiple locations and distributed departments. Consider just one small example: the office voicemail that goes without being listened to for hours, because no one is in the room to see the blinking red light on the desk phone. “Maybe the caller reached out after business hours. Maybe the call came in while you were in a meeting,” Marlin said in a recent report. “Doesn't matter. Whatever opportunity might have come from that phone call might be irretrievable, all because a busy schedule crowded your view of your answering machine.” VoIP on the other hand can offer a Find Me/Follow Me function or alerts on one’s smartphone or tablet when a message comes in. According to an annual trends report from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byer, people check their smartphones around 150 times every single day. “Therefore, voicemail messages uploaded to an office email account synced to a smartphone have a greater chance of getting noticed,” Marlin said. From that simple example, it’s easy to see how Web conferencing, messaging, telephony, and other communications avenues working together to optimize operations is a message that makes sense for boosting productivity. At Star2Star, scalability and flexibility are key differentiators for our UC solution.
Switching to Star2Star is easy. Just contact your Star2Star re-seller at AccuVoIP Services. Contact http://www.accuvoipservices.com/ at 262-649-1097 They’ll analyze your current situation and expenses and show you exactly how much money you’ll save with Star2Star. In most cases, you can even keep your old phone numbers.

Unified Communication: The Future Foundations for Customer Service

Contact center operations are rapidly moving into the cloud as a growing number of businesses embrace the flexibility and simplicity of subscription-based services. For channel partners, this presents a big opportunity to talk up unified communications as a way to facilitate seamless agent communication and streamlined cross-department collaboration to better serve customers.
According to Frost & Sullivan, the cloud contact center market is growing at almost twice the rate of premises-based contact center systems (11.6 percent versus 6.1 percent). Moving a contact center to the cloud has a number of benefits in terms of flexibility. It allows customer service agents and supervisors to be in any location, and allows companies to scale up to manage peak or seasonal demands—a huge benefit in the retail and entertainment sector. Additionally, cloud-based contact centers support business continuity and remote agent strategies.
However, taking full advantage of that flexibility requires an underlying collaborative approach that makes communication seamless between agents and departments, with a centralized way to link distributed agents and resources. Functions such as seamless call transfer, the option to escalate chats to calls, mobile support, and more become crucial.
Adopting UC in a contact center environment can directly address some top pain points for customers. A January 2015 customer experience survey examined consumer perceptions of service while making online or phone purchases over $25 in the previous six months. The study, from Harris Interactive, found that consumers most want agent service continuity and choice of channels for follow-up communications.
The study found that the stakes are high. It revealed that 86 percent would be very likely to switch to another company in the future after a bad customer service experience.
Star2Star can enable the contact center with a UC platform that supports voice, video, presence, chat, and analytics between agents and across departments and geographies—thereby enabling organizations to gain a differentiating level of customer service.
StarCenter is a complete inbound call center only available from Star2Star that keeps users on the cutting edge. StarCenter makes it easy to add and administer queues and agents with an easy-to-use web-based interface. Star2Star delivers customizable features such as call routing, management and reporting.
StarCenter includes StarView, which gives call center managers the power to turn raw call center data into usable information that helps propel a business forward.
Make the Switch to Star2Star Switching to Star2Star is easy. Just contact your Star2Star re-seller at AccuVoIP Services. Contact http://www.accuvoipservices.com/ at 262-649-1097 They’ll analyze your current situation and expenses and show you exactly how much money you’ll save with Star2Star. In most cases, you can even keep your old phone numbers.

Scalable VoIP Communications Keep Well Care Home Heath in Tip-top Shape

Imagine: You’re a healthcare agent, caring for an elderly patient in the comfort of his or her own home. Suddenly, a situation arises where you need assistance from a co-worker back at the office. To your dismay, the office line is continuously busy and you don’t have access to your colleagues’ personal phone numbers. A situation like this could be detrimental. For this reason, it’s of the utmost importance for those in the healthcare industry to have access to the most advanced methods of communication that today’ s phone technology has to offer. If the employee in this hypothetical situation had access to a suite of unified communications (UC) features on his or her personal device that was directly connected to an office phone line, he or she could have seen the availabilities of colleagues to avoid calling lines that were unavailable. Additionally, the distressed employee could have also turned to a wealth of real-time communication options—like instant chat, for instance—to find other ways to connect with someone immediately. Thankfully, Star2Star was able to help a real home healthcare agency prevent such situations by implementing a best-in-class scalable cloud communications solution. Well Care Home Health, a Wilmington, North Carolina-based healthcare agency realized that in its line of business, communication can make all the difference - especially when a patient’s well-being is on the line. Their legacy phone system wasn’t providing enough support. With eight major locations and a total of 5,000 employees spanning the Southeastern section of the state, the agency realized its traditional PSTN-based system was failing to provide the advanced communications technology they needed. Well Care turned to Star2Star to solve its communication shortcomings. The first order of business was to unify all of their business locations into one account, so that employees from every office could not only communicate internally more easily, but also so that employees from one location could manage calls from another office location. Centralizing communications means that no call will ever go unanswered and no customer will endure a lengthy hold time, as all hands are on deck and can help manage the queues even in disparate locations. Additionally, Star2Star’s robust suite of UC features enables Well Care to communicate internally at much higher efficiency. Most notably the agency takes advantage of the system’s conference calling capabilities, which allow employees to communicate all at once no matter if they are working in the office or out in the field. Another benefit afforded from Well Care’s transition to a scalable cloud communication solution was its mobile capability. Now, agents in the field can stay in touch with colleagues and accept forwarded calls to their personal device when they are not in the office. In this way, agents can provide better serve their patients by always being available at one phone number via the Find Me/Follow Me feature which transfers call made to an office phone to a mobile phone. What’s more, the Star2Star cloud-based communications system makes scaling the phone system to new locations much simpler for the agency. With a traditional PBX, adding new phone lines to serve as a bridge between locations presented a huge cost center as well as unnecessary downtime. Now, if the agency wishes to expand to new locations it can simply do so internally by setting up the StarBox Cloud Connection Manager. Once that is up and running it will automatically connect with the other offices. These benefits are just a snapshot of what Well Care Home Health gained from trading their legacy phone system for a Star2Star scalable unified communication solution. To find out more about how the healthcare agency augmented its business communication read the full case study!
Switching to Star2Star is easy. Just contact your Star2Star re-seller at AccuVoIP Services. Contact http://www.accuvoipservices.com/ at 262-649-1097 They’ll analyze your current situation and expenses and show you exactly how much money you’ll save with Star2Star. In most cases, you can even keep your old phone numbers.