Business is small business. About 97% of businesses in New Zealand operate with less than 20 employees, and that ratio holds true just about everywhere. Small businesses are truly the financial engines of the global economy - yet you’d never know it by looking at tech world, where everything...
Culture is one of the few factors that a company can actually control, and many companies have found it to be an engine for a sustained competitive advantage. Leaders in every field have found that they can build a community of customers and advocates not necessarily by doing something radically...
For the most part, things don’t change at all for a very long time. Then they seem to change all at once. There’s a term for that: “Punctuated Equilibrium.” That’s where the world is right now with “voice first” technology, including software like mobile apps and hardware like in-home...
Intelligence is distributed. How does a business leverage the collective intelligence of working teams and their customers? Real insights happen when people come together and synthesize information in a dynamic format. A human conversation still can’t be beat as an engine of innovation and...
A decade ago, the first smartphones connected to an infinite app ecosphere remade the world in their own image. Consumers and business buyers adopted them practically instantly, saturating the market at one of the fastest rate of any technology in history.
Now another seismic shift is coming....
Google Voice was one of the earliest applications in the VoIP space and a massively disruptive force in the field of voice communications. It introduced a new level of adaptability to communication services, allowing users to easily forward their calls to their cellphone or an inbox where it...
What are your employees doing all day? There’s no need to wonder, go to the data. That’s what the Auckland-based estate planners at Perpetual Guardian did. Founder Andrew Barnes, discovered that across the globe, knowledge workers are spending less than three hours of their work day productively...
All things being equal (as they often are), customer experience (CX) becomes the great differentiator in a crowded marketplace. In addition to reducing churn, happy customers go on to become vocal champions and brand advocates. This advocacy results in a serious amplification of the brand...
By 2025, projections show that New Zealand businesses will be responsible for adding 140,000 support service jobs in primary industries. New Zealand’s Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) oversees businesses related to farming, fishing, food, animal welfare, biosecurity, and forestry. Support...
Sometimes you can’t wait for customers to come to you. Field service and mobile technology are two of the most significant trends in business and development in each go hand-in-hand.
By the end of this year, more than half of enterprises overall, and 80% of those in the middle of
Starting a business used to be a big deal. The launch costs were high, survival rates were low, and financial resources were scarce. Those days are fading into history as more and more startups discover low-cost tech, mobile operations, and original funding sources that allow them to launch...
Two out of three people on Earth now have mobile phones, according to a 2018 update by Hootsuite and WeAreSocial. There are 5.1 billion unique mobile users, which adds up to 68% of the global population. Smartphones dominate as the preferred device for accessing the web. More than half of web...
The Asia Pacific region is forecast to account for nearly two-thirds of global growth, according to the International Monetary Fund, with technology companies, industrial goods, and healthcare leading the way.
Small business owners in the Asia-Pacific region are feeling optimistic about the future, according to a new 2017 CPA study surveying small business across the region. Of course, that optimism isn’t universal. Companies with a focus on technology, innovation, and global markets are most likely...
http://blog.spokephone.com/5-tips-on-scaling-your-business-without-hiringSmall is getting big. Companies are tightening their command chains in order to act more quickly and decisively. Innovation and ideation are stifled in the hierarchical bureaucracy of middle management.
New technology is...
Phones should be simple. Dial and talk. Unfortunately, that’s not the way it works for most business phone systems. In search of utility, business phones have grown more and more complex over the years. Now it’s come to the point where many employees refuse to touch them or just unplug them and ...
What makes a new business model successful? Many great ideas have made it all the way to the market stage only to drift away. The ones that gain traction and stick around do so because they arrive at the same time as complementary technologies that make them more practical.
Startups in Australia and New Zealand have a jump on the future of business simply because their respective populations already lead the world in mobile adoption. With Australia in first place and New Zealand in third on GSMA’s Mobile Connectivity Index, new businesses here explore innovative...
What business are you in? There’s a good argument to be made that there’s only one good answer: The Customer Service Business. If you’re not serving the customer, you might not be in any business for very long.
Innovations based on mobile tech have added more than $14.1 billion per year to the Australian economy and are buoying up economies all across the Asia Pacific region. As more businesses get connected in remote locations and 4G/5G rolls out to more places, you can expect to see a great deal of...
The new collaborative, zero infrastructure economy demands a different way of thinking about what a business really is. Although many have tried to define this seismic mindshift, the best summation came from Tom Goodwin, SVP at Havas Media:
Our cultural mythos loves to shine a spotlight on the superhero. The Elon Musks and Jeff Bezos of the world are envisioned to be solitary heroes who single-handedly disrupted and disarmed entire industries. But behind every great leader is an effective team that can work together to solve...
By the end of this year, more than half of enterprises overall, and 80% of those in the middle of
The race is on to establish a new world of 5G communications. A wide range of global telecom providers and hardware manufacturers have joined forces in the 3GPP consortium to create a functional planet-wide standard for 5G New Radio (NR), which is projected to be the final evolution of mobile...
Growth is change and change
Looking for the perfect spot to relocate your business? Have you outgrown your current location, or are you searching for an area with better infrastructure? Or, in the case of companies exiting from overheated rental markets, maybe you need a little more bang for your buck. It’s easy to know...
There are many benefits to working with a more flexible workforce, especially for companies navigating the sea change of digital transformation. It definitely requires a big shift in business priorities. Each company will have its own set of job responsibilities that can be fulfilled by...
http://fortune.com/2013/09/19/50-best-small-and-medium-size-companies-to-work-for/How lean is your business? Are you paying for expenses that your competitors aren’t? Every business owner struggles with this essential Nice vs. Need question: What can I do without and still offer superior service...
The smartphone is the undoubtable star of the retail revolution, serving as a virtual storefront for both the online and brick-and-mortar shopping experience. The marketplaces of the world are unified by the web, driving a hyper-competitive and fast-paced race, where the customer experience is...
Have you ever had a thought so inspiring that you had to jump up and pace around as you discussed it? Motion and thought are tightly bound up in each other, and voice is the most direct channel for their expression. Digital transformation across business phone systems is helping workers to solve...
The mobile device liberated business from the office, allowing greater immersion in the real world, and a better understanding of markets and prevailing conditions. Sometimes, though, business technology has been a bit slow to keep up with the needs of entrepreneurs and business people. In...
Digital transformation winners are leveraging cutting edge technology to improve customer experience, enhance employee productivity, and empower decision-making through better data intelligence. And yet, a new report published last month by McKinsey Global highlighted the slim productivity gains...
A phone call is the most direct way to get answers. That’s still true for customers just as much as it is for collaborative teams coordinating their efforts across vast distances. When the goal is to ensure a common understanding among two or more people, asynchronous channels like text, email,...
At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this year, Qualcomm presented a module for phone manufacturers that will make it easier for them to develop their own 5G devices. Qualcomm’s Exec VP Don Rosenberg wrote, “We believe 5G will change the world even more profoundly than 3G and 4G; that it...
Have you noticed that the Telecom industry seems to love acronyms? From PBX to VoIP to DDIs, it can be time-consuming to look up all these unfamiliar letter combinations when all you need is a platform to make and take some phone calls. The good news is that there are only a few key terms that...
Globally, business will spend more than $2 trillion on digital transformation projects in 2019. They are upgrading their infrastructure, digitizing their communication network, and automating routine tasks. Cloud-based business applications can better serve fast-growing, agile companies and...
A wave of advances in HD Voice, VoLTE and 5G for mobile broadband in New Zealand and Australia seem to herald a new Golden Age of Voice for businesses across the region. That may also explain why a Deloitte survey reported the first increase in the number of voice calls by millennials in four...
Digital transformation reached a tipping point in the Australia/New Zealand (ANZ) market last year. By the end of 2017, nearly half (49%) of ANZ CIOs had led their companies into digital platforms for rapidly exchanging information with competitors, customers, regulators, stakeholders and other...
Two decades ago, office phone systems for small business gained access to enterprise class PBX phone features, thanks to new technology known as voice over IP (VoIP). This set off a burst of entrepreneurship and upgraded customer expectations on how a small business should sound. VoIP is...
Success breeds success. Customers want to know that they are dealing with a partner that’s thriving and growing. While many consumers say they support small business, they actually make purchases based on perceived value – familiar brands associated with the best quality at the lowest price....
A new Frontline worker study by IFS found that while 89 percent of companies surveyed use subcontractors, only 10 percent had a robust mobile channel for staying in contact with field service workers.
Flexible work arrangements really do improve productivity, but only when businesses also...
Customers expect professional organizations to maintain a professional phone system. That usually means things like an automated greeting, an IVR with extension numbers for various departments, the ability to transfer calls easily, multi-user calling and conferencing, and a few other similar...
An office phone system used to be a baseline need for any real business. But is this still true? Some companies don’t even have an office. The rise of the freelance economy and flexible work has made expensive, hard-wired phone system obsolete for many companies. Contractors, field workers,...
In New Zealand, it’s not uncommon to find businesses operating with extremely tight cash flows and limited access to capital. This puts increased pressure on containing fixed costs so business owners can manage unpredictable revenue streams. While VoIP-based tech has done a great job of...
https://www2.deloitte.com/au/mobile-consumer-surveyWhen you’re on a business call, you want to hear every nuance. You also want to be sure that call doesn’t drop as you are about to close the deal or embarrass your company with echoes and jitter. Fortunately, new VoIP-based technology to improve...
Ultra-fast streaming video, crystal clarity in voice quality, and great leaps in energy efficiency are just some of the ways the mobile experience will improve with 5G. In 2018, the fifth generation of standards by the international mobile telecommunications (IMT) group, is making headlines in...
Business agility is a basic survival skill in a volatile economy. Fiona Cannon’s The Agility Mindset details how firms have been able to improve their financial position and come out ahead of the competition through a commitment to agility. In his foreword to the book, Lloyds of London’s Sir Win...
All businesses have essentially one and only one problem: How do you stay profitable? If you are only breaking even, you won’t be able to survive unexpected variances in the market. Profitability is a basic survival skill. It’s no wonder why profitability was cited as a top concern for...
Today’s businesses have seemingly endless choices when it comes to telephone providers, yet finding the right solution can be quite difficult, especially for a small business. Consumers expect enterprise-grade service and a flawless customer experience regardless of the size of the company they...
VoIP was an incredible advance in telecom a quarter of a century ago. The tech has matured over the decades since and now VoIP has surpassed PSTN to become the most used form of telephony in many parts of the world. As adoption rates for the next generation of VoIP gains acceptance, not all VoIP...
If you are currently under contract for your business phone system, it’s a good idea to check the date of your “Evergreen” clause. That’s the area the specifies when your policy will auto-renew – it can be a few weeks or even months before the contract completion date.
Shopping for your first business phone system? Don’t despair!
It can be frustrating when it seems like there are endless options but none that are ideally suited to your business needs. Having more options are generally better, but when you have too many options with no context on which ones...
Moving used to be a big deal for an established business. Customers were accustomed to seeing a business at a specific address with a familiar phone number. In the 21st century, however, a business is defined by what it does, not where it is. Activity Based Working (ABW) has knocked down cubicle...
A lot can happen in a year, let alone 24 months. Yet that’s the length of a typical VoIP phone contract for many business phone systems. A 2-year contract might make sense for a larger enterprise where things tend to move slowly and changes require plenty of lead time. For a small business with...
The image of a phone-shy, conversation-adverse millennial has become something of a cultural trope. But do millenials really hate phone calls or do they just hate being torn away from what they are doing to deal with interruptions? New studies of trends among millennials, especially those in...
Speed matters. 70% of software firms and 68% of companies generally say that “agility” is in the top 3 priorities. An agile company can respond to customer demand in real time, make critical decisions on the fly, and secure new connections from anywhere. Mobility and agility go hand-in-hand....
Customer experience makes competitors irrelevant. It doesn't make sense to compete on price because that's merely a race to the bottom. Similarly, competing on quality or features alone won’t work in a global marketplace because somebody can find a way to do it better and cheaper tomorrow....
The public's need for mobile has expanded to become the primary growth generator for telecom services all across the globe, according to a new report from the IDC. That demand is even more intensified for businesses and consumers in the Asia Pacific region, where 2017 growth in telecom revenues...
Digital transformation in telecom could unlock with more than $2 trillion globally for businesses, consumers and society at large in the coming decade, according to an economic analysis of innovation by the World Economic Forum (WEF). That figure includes a $440 billion market cap for future...
Less than 200 leagues from the International Date Line, Auckland is the first urban center to greet each new day. Similarly, New Zealand is leading the world into the new mobile-first reality, ranking No. 3 on the planet in mobile connectivity, fractionally behind Australia and Norway. Advances...
Even the best sales reps don’t have enough time to do it all. On an average day, sales reps must manage email, go through voice mails, learn new software, log new accounts into back office systems, update the CRM with new info on existing accounts, report on how they productive they are, and...
Coordinated efforts make all the difference between productivity and wasted effort. When you can rely on employees to keep operations running smoothly, you can tackle the bigger issues facing your business.
After years of research and scores of business surveys, the Project Management Institute...
Engagement underlies both productivity and profitability. How to you bring in new customers? Engagement. How to you retain existing customers? Engagement. How do you keep your employees on task? Engagement. Many complicated, expensive tech tools exist to help you measure and boost engagement,...
All over the world, entrepreneurs are on the move. They are growing, scaling, consolidating or restructuring their businesses. A good representative of this trend is 99Designs, which announced last year that they are packing up US operations and moving back to Australia. This move was a critical...
Mobile phones can be powerful tools for small businesses. Like all powerful tools, they require special handling to make them secure and productive. Mobile phones improve productivity when they make it possible for managers to reach employees -- and for employees to do their work -- away from...
The mobile world represents the future of work, but that future will not arrive all at once. In some cases, the road forward is a bit bumpy. Under fire for its troubled broadband rollout, Australia has moved out ahead on several fronts and now leads the world in mobile connectivity. The latest...
Australia ranks in the world’s top 5 countries with the highest mobile penetration, in Deloitte’s Mobile Consumer Survey. At the same time, more business owners are holding down costs by operating from home or coordinating employees in remote locations. The merging of those trends has brought...
AI, automation and machine learning have huge applications for business communications, from self-healing networks that can anticipate network vulnerabilities to improved call quality from AI that can perform minute optimizations that used to happen manually, configuring and adjusting network...
Voice is back. The rollout of new technologies like VoLTE and HD voice are bringing voice quality back into focus after years of VoIP expansion. Cool accessories, headsets and advanced sound chips are optimizing the voice experience--from noise canceling technology to 3D sound effects that allow...
Should you or shouldn’t you?
Is it more productive to answer phone calls as they come in or let them go to voicemail and sort through who deserves a call back? It’s not an easy call, so to speak. There’s a complex calculus to the formulation of the optimal phone call answering methodology. ...
Working without interruptions can be an incredibly productive habit—even if it’s never been harder with all the digital distractions around us. Fortunately, the same technology that has been guilty of interrupting you so often can also be deployed to create a productivity bubble around you.
Professional businesses need a professional phone line. The business line is like an auditory storefront for the modern consumer, especially mobile shoppers. 54% of business phone calls come from a customer on a mobile device, and this number is growing steadily.
Everything is getting smarter in 2018. You may have read about the near future of smart cities filled with smart homes where people drive smart cars that were safety tested by smart dummies. But what do people really mean when they use the word “smart”?
Ever had that feeling of working super hard, all day long, only to discover that you’d hardly accomplished anything at all? Constant interruptions, whether from electronic notifications or a chatty coworker, can undermine our productivity and sap the brain of the energy it needs. Productivity is...
A virtual phone system is a communication platform designed to be deployed across your mobile phone infrastructure. You can get all the benefits of a PBX, including extension calling, multi-office routing, find-me/follow me features, mobile-to-mobile call transfer and group calling. It allows...
Productivity. Everyone wants it, from time-strapped entrepreneurs to budget-conscious corporate managers to number-crunching macroeconomists obsessing over global growth.
Productivity means more time, more money, and better results. What’s not to love?
How productive have you been today? What kind of environment do you need to do your best work?
In the future of work, every worker will seek out the optimal environment for their own state of “flow” -- where workers can be “completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away....
As a rule, sales reps hate administrative paperwork and sales managers want to see greater productivity. Why can’t both get what they want? The problem, as indicated by a recent time study, is that too many sales reps are spending 78% of their time doing things other than selling. Regardless of...
Business telephone service and a physical office was the backbone of business for many years, but digitization and the future of work are ushering in a new reality. BYOD was just the tip of the iceberg.
The mobile revolution, combined with the augmented workforce, are creating a new world of...
Phones are simple. You dial and you talk, sometimes you leave a message. It rings, you pick it up. This concludes basic training.
Imagine if your business phone system was that simple. Routing calls to the next available employee? Built-in. Find Me/Follow Me? Automatic. Local numbers around the...
In running a small business, the exact same action can be right or wrong depending on when you do it. Market conditions can take a sudden left turn and customer expectations seem to reset themselves overnight. To survive, a company has to stay agile enough to adapt on the fly.
In the search for utility, too many companies have wandered into the dark forest of complexity. In pursuit of the reasonable goal of providing more value for their customers, these businesses confused more features with greater benefits.
For over a century, the national telephone system served as the nerve center to the industrial system that still underlies our economy. It was the backbone of B2B and B2C sales and service, as well as an important staple in social and family life. Early in the 20th century, the telephone became...
Voice over IP (VoIP) has already begun to replace public switched telephone networks (PSTN) as the default communications backbone in the workplace of the future.
Now, a new Technavio report on projected global VoIP deployments through 2021 suggests that this VoIP will continue to win over new...
What is the best low-cost business phone system for your early stage company or startup? Many small businesses begin with very little capital or investment, using software applications and a remote team to start up, learn, grow, and expand.
A business phone system might be the largest expense...
Digital disruption continues to shake the business world, and this megatrend is only accelerating. A study from Constellation Research analyzed the rate of churn for corporations entering and exiting the S&P from 1958 to 2011. If the rate remains constant, three-quarters of enterprises on the...
The smartphone revolutionized business communication by mobilizing the most critical business functions, and allowing innovators to make the world their office. But the evolution is far from over. The smartphone is just coming into its own as a tool that not only replaces the hardware and wires...
Millennials are not fond of conflict. Of course, that’s not true for all millennials or for just millennials, but there is plenty of evidence that conflict-avoidance is a fairly common problem in the business world today.
That conclusion is backed up by reports of millennial conflict training...
Do you ever feel like you’re just spinning your wheels, that despite your hard work, your efforts don’t really pay off?
What if there was one tiny shift you could make that could transform your outcomes in a big way? What if you could multiply your impact to propel your business forward, while...
Voice over IP (VoIP) is just over 20 years old. In just two decades, IP telephony has evolved to the point where VoIP ranks in first place as the most used office phone system, supporting 36% of business today. VoIP providers turn analog sounds into digital packets that are transferred as data...
There are many good reasons to make and receive calls on your personal phone, and the majority of entrepreneurs already do. The problem is that handling business calls on your personal number puts your private security and your business data at risk.
A smarter option is to add a virtual phone...
People love their phones but they seem to hate phone calls. How do you resolve this paradox? New data on how people are using their phones, along with advice from communications experts, suggest that the phone call is being reborn as an essential business tool for the 21st century.
Deloitte's ...
It can be a challenge to ascertain the total cost of ownership (TCO) and return on investment (ROI) of a professional PBX system. Many costs arise unexpectedly based on a variety of factors, such as uneven growth and software integrations on your network.
A 2017 study estimated the average...
Once you’ve seen a TV show in HD, it’s hard to look at a show on an old screen. Analog images look so fuzzy compared to the new digital standards. In the same way, HD Voice is resetting expectations for baseline audio. Voice UX is becoming the new battleground for differentiation in the crowded...
Plain old telephone service is coming to an end. For over a century, copper wires and analog switches, and circuits connected the world into one happy telephone network. This network was at the heart of business and social life, and the engine of economic growth for many decades.
That’s a dangerous thing to do. Business is mobile, but using your personal mobile number for business calls will introduce several unnecessary risks to you and your business unless you protect yourself and your private mobile number.
Consider a few reasons why you should protect yourself with ...
Voice over IP (VoIP) phone service began as an inexpensive or free way for people to make and receive voice calls on the internet, and blew up into a paradigm shifting phenomena. Over the past few decades, IP telephony has completely disrupted the telecommunications industry, from the way that...
The robots are coming! The robots are coming! Have you heard? They are coming, to replace your job, your spouse, your life! They may even want to perform all the mundane, tedious tasks that keep you from doing your real work.
In the 1990’s, companies begin to experiment with outsourcing work that wasn’t considered business critical, usually as a cost-saving measure. The results were quite mixed. Sometimes outsourcing backfired, and ended up costing a company even more money. Regardless, this was the beginning of...
