For Skype aficionados, one of the mysteries of the modern world must be why people still pay for phone usage. By now, we’ve all done business with people who proffer their Skype ID as the preferred method of contacting them. The flipside, of course, is that most of us have at times experienced frustrating, broken-up conversations over Skype that detract from the content of the call. But Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephony, whether using Skype’s free service or some other means, has advanced significantly over the last few years and with recruiters’ heavy-duty phone use it has the power to reduce this major overhead.

Moreover, in an age of hot-desking and mobile working, it can also bring considerable operational benefits.

Recruiters need to fully understand the options and services available though, as well as some of the quality issues associated with the fast-moving world of internet telephony. Raymond Pennie, commercial director of professional services provider, Kamanchi, warns it is an area where there are deals available, which are just too good to be true, while some providers may try to tie people in for the long term. Nonetheless, the good news for the customer is that the cost of voice is falling dramatically. “It’s all going to go to either zero or be routed for a fixed monthly fee in an all-you-can-eat sort of way,” he says.

Pennie points out that a mere two years ago, VoIP wasn’t anywhere near good enough to run a business on but claims that today it is ‘90% perfect’, even though he admits it’s never going to be as good as wire-towire service. As for Skype, he says: “I’m not convinced Skype is yet good enough to be really relied upon for business-to-business but it costs nothing.”

Ultimately, it comes down to whether the cost benefit is worth the quality sacrifice that users sometimes experience, and for firms that want to operate on the international stage, the business case is made much easier. “There is a business we use in Hong Kong that will effectively make all our calls local,” he explains, adding: “In the US, everything is low-cost and the world is following that model. If I want to make a call to a business partner in Singapore, I’ll make a local call in the UK from my local bundle so I pay nothing to phone a number that transports me to Singapore for free and then it’s charged at a local Singapore-to-Singapore rate. The ability to route voice messages from A to B is now much more mature than it ever was.”

Rather than having to understand anything about the technology, recruiters just need to understand what the technology does

Meanwhile, others are of the opinion that the public internet simply isn’t up to the job of offering a business standard service. Rob Walton, managing director of Voxalis, which provides a fully managed, cloud-based service across a private network, says anyone who believes the public internet is a viable alternative for business telephony is “simply delusional”.

He explains: “Particularly in recruitment where most of the transactions are done over the telephone you need to have a robust, reliable business grade service and to have that recruiters need to be working with a service provider that is in control of the core infrastructure and the network. It is not feasible or practical to deliver business grade telephony over the public internet.”

Walton claims Voxalis’s approach still offers significant savings over traditional telephony services but when considering any new system he urges recruiters to conduct a thorough audit of their telephony system and assess the return on investment (ROI) of a replacement. The company is developing an ROI calculator that will lead a potential client through a variety of questions that try to identify tangible and intangible costs. Among the questions recruiters need to ask are: what are current maintenance costs of their PBX (private branch exchange); when does it come to the end of its life and will need to be replaced; what is the cost of replacing it; what is the cost of renting their analogue or ISDN telephone lines and the cost of calls? “Most of our clients are multiple site organisations and all of these arguments become strengthened and amplified,” he says. “While they exist for single site organisations there is a stronger argument for using our technology across multiple sites.”

Reassuringly, all the providers Recruiter interviewed indicate that no-one is merely using technology for technology’s sake and there is increased emphasis on ROI. According to Steve Howard, head of client services at London Systems, many recruiters are curious about internet telephony and the cost savings it can achieve but he says this isn’t the sole driver and that logistical and operational benefits also rank highly. Increasingly, it is likely that switching telephony systems will take place as part of a wider IT implementation or change. Hosted phone systems require a certain amount of bandwidth to work effectively and, as Howard stresses, if a firm is going to invest in this level of connectivity it makes financial sense to make use of that infrastructure for as many services as possible. “Consolidate your services into a single solution, get rid of all the ancillary stuff that you don’t need to keep paying for,” he says. “So for example, if we were putting in a fully-hosted system for voice and data services, we will put in a single 100Mb fibre-optic connection and that will deliver all of those services across that building. It will also support further services as well if they want to add things like video-conferencing.”

Pennie agrees that the single most important connection in an office now is the data connection to the internet. “It used to be really expensive to get dedicated data connections and now it’s become less and less. But it may be that you have to improve your data connection to reduce your telephone bill,” he says. Even if businesses don’t opt for telephony as part of a hosted IT solution it looks highly likely that in the medium- to long-term, small- to medium-sized businesses will recognise the benefits of some form of hosted telephony system in the same way they have with other applications delivered via software-as-aservice (SaaS). As well as being able to scale up and down with the business like SaaS, hosted telephony also reduces the reliance on in-house IT expertise.

“There is increasingly less argument for an organisation to invest in a telephone system that will undoubtedly go out of date in five years’ time. So rather than having to understand anything about the technology [recruiters] just need to understand what the technology does,” says Walton. “And when you are not buying technology and installing, maintaining and looking after it, it doesn’t really matter how it works in the background so long as you have a service level agreement [from your provider] that says this is what we are going to do and it ticks all the boxes in terms of the functionality.”