Julianna
Conference calls can be very expensive, and regular video or web conferencing reaches well beyond the budget of most small businesses. That’s where Skype comes in – a VOIP service (Voice Over IP), Skype lets you make phone calls to anywhere in the world over your internet connection – for free! Yes, I mentioned the ‘f’ word again, free long distance phone service must be good. If you haven’t heard of Skype before, you’re probably now thinking – what’s the catch? Well the short answer is, there isn’t one. The long answer is, while you can make calls from computer to computer (and you can use either an IP phone or a headset to make this a little more manageable for you), and call out to a landline/mobile phone for a small fee, unless you are in a handful of countries, such as the US and many countries in Europe, you can’t use SkypeIn – which lets you receive calls from landlines and gives you a standard phone number.
Let me back up for a minute here though, we can get to SkypeIn in a minute. Let’s start with how Skype works. All you need to do is download and install the program onto your computer and you can start adding contacts, instant messaging and chatting in minutes. You can call people who already have Skype, on a Skype-to-Skype call, and it is always free, or call a landline or cell phone anywhere in the world at very low long distance rates using SkypeOut.
You can already see how this is helping a small business save money – day time long distance and international calls – during your regular business hours – are very expensive. Because you are making calls over the internet, Skype rates don’t change throughout the day. If you get your clients and business associates using Skype as well, all your calls to them will be free, and video conferencing too – all you need is a webcam and you are good to go.
Now I mentioned SkypeIn, this gives you a phone number that you can provide to anyone, anywhere and have them call you just as they usually would on your business or mobile phone. The problem if you are in Canada, is that currently you can’t get a Canadian phone number. This is not to say that you can’t use SkypeIn, it just means that you will have to use a number from another country – the US, UK and Japan are just a few of your choices. This might be handy if you want to start an international office, or are travelling to one of these countries regularly, but otherwise it just means anyone calling you is now paying long distance charges to call that country, even if you are in Canada (also, this service is in Beta, so stability isn’t guaranteed).
There are other great features too, such as voicemail, and because of Skype’s popularity in the high tech community, many developers are building great little apps that let you do even more for very little to no money. For some of the best, check out Five ways Skype helps your business over at Freelance Switch. Whether you want to call across the street, internationally, set up a conference call or do videoconferencing, Skype is a very useful tool for your small business.