By Sharla Sikes

The VoIP game is going well enough that the big-name telecommunications companies are focusing time and efforts into improving products to draw more customers–especially in the small and medium business categories. In search of more IP phone customers, Qwest has upgraded and expanded its VoIP services, OneFlex.

The enhancements, intended to make products easier to use and more functional, include both OneFlex Hosted VoIP and Integrated Access products. Some of the upgrades include compression to fit more calls and data into existing services; the ability for customers to dial “0” to reach an operator or leave voice mail and a portal feature allowing businesses to divide administration of groups of employees. Qwest provides a user portal allowing access to the new features.

“We developed these features based on feedback from our customers,” said Thuy Ha, director of product management for Enterprise Local Voice, VoIP and Hosting Solutions at Qwest. “They have asked us what more can they do so they can continue to get cost savings out of the service or simplify it even further, so we have given them more control in the portal.”

A business can route its escape-to-operator function by variables such as time of day, and set up sub-administrators in order to manage settings and delegate tasks.

“We provide customers with an office administrator portal through which they can log in and manage their communications needs,” Ha said. “Our hosted VoIP customer can manage their end users – configure templates, decide where end users have certain capabilities, like the ability to make long-distance calls. We’ve heard from customers, as they are growing and have more locations, they want to be able to assign other people the capability of subset control.”
One customer said he chose Qwest because of its services and features as well as lower cost.

“We had a T-1 for communications, but we shrunk a little bit in [number of people],”
 said OneFlex Integrated Access customer Jeff Randolph, president of Randolph & Associates, a 15-person engineering and land-survey firm in Peoria, Ill. “When we channelized that T-1 and went integrated access, we didn’t see any reduction in data, and it didn’t bother the phone system. We got new phones, everything updated for less money than we are paying.”

I would be surprised if more of the big players don’t continue to follow suit, attempting to lure the customers who deserted them for VoIP services back. With larger budgets for marketing and development, they may continue to gain ground on the smaller independent VoIP providers.

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