As early adopters and testers of VoIP and mobility products, we are constantly struggling with explaining and “”proving value”” of some of the next generation technology that we test and play with. Yesterday however, while in the dentist chair, I believe that I had an IP epiphany on the true benefits
of IP and mobility technology!
I received a distinctive “”buzz”” on my cell-enabled Blackberry notifying me of an important voice mail, which had been forwarded to me from my Mitel VoIP voice mail system (located in our corporate offices in Markham, Ont.). I pressed one button on the Blackberry to return the call, entered my confidential password and heard an important voice mail from our new director, Bill Elliott, related to a time-sensitive client issue.
I then “”zeroed”” out from the VoIP voice mail system and Bill answered the phone from his IP telework set in his North Bay home office via the public Internet. While we were on the phone, he sent me an e-mail to review and approve. I hung up as my dentist needed to continue to work on me, but in the meantime, I connected to the public Internet to review some public information related to the issue at hand, review Bill’s e-mail and wait for a break with the dentist.
Within a few minutes, I again called Bill back using one button and told him URL that I had gathered additional information from, approved the e-mail and its intent and hung up. This whole transaction took about five minutes.
But the epiphany was that here I was in a dentist office, connected over the cellular network, using VoIP technology from our corporate offices, using the public Internet to view information, and lastly using the public Internet to connect to my remote co-worker to his IP remote phone. Not only did we use many types of traditional telecom technologies during the transaction, we also were using next-generation IP-based technologies from a variety of sources to get and share the information we need to be able to support our clients, and from locations that we needed too. FYI, some of the technology belongs to Fox Group, while the mobile cellar network and e-mail is part of the hosted solutions provided by Bell Canada, and it all worked together.
One of the most amazing things about this situation was that this whole story occurred in a matter of minutes: Talk about using technology to increase personal and corporate productivity, to say nothing of the positive impact on customer satisfaction.
As always, Roberta welcomes your thoughts, comments and feedback on this topic. You can contact her at Roberta.Fox@FOXGROUP.ca or call 905.294.2821 x 1001.