There’s a lot of talk about enabling mobile-first work environments, but mobile-first cannot come at the expense of sacrificing choice call quality. For those who rely on IP telephony, well, that’s often the case. That’s to say if they wish to work from home where their broadband is weak – or from anywhere that’s not a fixed location, the quality of their voice calls could be poor. That might mean working from a Starbucks or taking a call on the go, from the motorway, or even a rural area.
Dave Dadds, CEO, VanillaIP, said, there needs to be a viable solution in this instance, adding VanillaIP’s created what he calls “not a mobile SIM.” Though a SIM, nonetheless, it delivers a slightly different kind of experience – a mobile extension, not a mobile phone service. “You could compare it to a softphone on the desktop, but it’s not a replacement to a mobile SIM. He calls it the ‘mobilisation of an extension.’
For customers, such an offering creates a few critical benefits, including housing calls, records, and other valuable details, including how many times an employee’s spoken with a customer. It keeps these data in a centralised analytics repository. Solving another key concern for enterprises, Dadds shared, if an employee leaves a company, the number they had will still belong to the company. This last point is based on the ability to only route calls to the User’s One Number – which can be taken from Company DDI Range, with the option to restrict routing via an 07 number, excluding SMS. Organisations concerned about retaining customers after someone leaves their company, no longer have to worry about that with the use of VanillaIP’s SIM.
“Because our SIM acts as an extension, it has full call recordings and call centre capabilities, too.” No additional infrastructure is needed and the issue of poor broadband becomes a thing of the past. Data, for the most part, can deal with latency quite well, but voice calls tend to misbehave, which is why he contends, to achieve the best quality voice connection in an increasingly mobile world, tapping the SIM’s the way to go.
“GSM allows for better call handling and voice assistants like Siri can aid in making as well as receiving calls. You can even deploy low-cost mobile phones with only voice and text because smartphones aren’t needed to deploy over the top apps”
Dadds told me, he does not see why there’s still all the fuss over the desk phone, adding, they’re limiting in a world where so many rely on mobility and mobile tools to power workplace experiences. Take the country of Sweden for instance. There, companies absorb the cost of their employee’s phones. This could be an inexpensive phone to maintain a certain level of security or a smartphone with all the features necessary to perform the duties of their job.
This is since workers there value mobility. The idea of purchasing an employee’s mobile device for the Swedish is not a novel concept across the European continent. Several companies, including many in the UK, already do so.
With the drive for remote working forced upon many because of COVID-19 and the advancement of technologies such as 5G, today’s service provider/reseller would find it wise to provide a sort of “one-size-fits-all-number” that operates across any device including soft and hard phones, along with the mobile SIM. “This will provide a much higher degree of usability and manageability and therefore a happy client, he shared with me.
