The TeleAdapt Group (www.teleadapt.com) is a leading provider of consumer electronics, power solutions and connectivity products for the OEM, Retail (High Street, Tax Free, Airlines) and Hospitality sector worldwide.
A high percentage of TeleAdapt’s outgoing calls are made to employees who are away from the office, and who are therefore contactable on their mobile phones. Unfortunately, when made from a landline, calls to these numbers can be expensive; at the moment, calls made during the day from a BT landline to a Vodafone mobile can cost up to 25p per minute depending on the calling plan.
"At the moment, users making phone calls from a landline to mobile phones are paying twice as much as they should because the call is going across two networks. However, with the Desktop Mobile, one simple device can save companies from this unnecessary expense," says David Robson, Director, Burnside Telecom.
The reason behind this inflated cost of landline-to-mobile calls is simple: a call from a landline to a mobile needs to cross both the landline PSTN network and the cellular GSM network, and therefore will incur two charges, with the terminating cellular charge being passed on by BT to its customers. With more than 20 of its employees now using company mobiles, TeleAdapt was clearly interested in any solution that could reduce the cost of calls to these mobile numbers.
As a result, when Gordon Brown, TeleAdapt’s CEO, received some information from Burnside Telecom, he was intrigued by the concept of the company’s Desktop Mobile, a one-box solution that allows a traditional PBX (SDX Index) to access the cellular/GSM network. Gordon was not aware of any competitive products offering the same functionality, and more importantly, the Desktop Mobile seemed to offer a quick, easy, and affordable way to reduce his escalating telephone bill.
Gordon decided to trial the Desktop Mobile at TeleAdapt in order to see whether the device could actually reduce the cost of calls to mobiles, by routing these calls through the cellular network. The Desktop Mobile was easily integrated into TeleAdapt’s existing PBX equipment, and in less than two hours the unit had become part of the office phone system. After this initial set-up, no additional user interaction was required, as the entire call routing process is automatic and invisible to the caller. After less than a week of trialling the product, Gordon was completely won over, and contacted Burnside to purchase the unit.
“The device does exactly what it says on the tin,” Gordon said. “It was easy to install, and was up-and-running very quickly. Straight away, I could see that the Desktop Mobile was going to cut our monthly phone bill, especially since we regularly make a lot of calls to mobile phones.”
With the Desktop Mobile successfully integrated with its PBX, TeleAdapt could now choose from a wide range of cellular network tariffs. The most attractive tariff was Vodafone’s Sharetime scheme, a service plan which offers users shared minutes and free calls across a group of mobile phones. TeleAdapt was already using this calling plan with its mobile employees, but with the Desktop Mobile in place, the company was able to extend the reach of the service to the desktop, as well.
The Vodafone Sharetime tariff now allows TeleAdapt’s office-based employees to phone their mobile colleagues for free, subject to the mobile operator's terms and conditions. The Vodafone package also offers shared inclusive minutes for calls to any network at any time, and allows users to carry over any unused minutes to the next month.
Now, thanks to the Desktop Mobile, office-based TeleAdapt employees can enjoy all of these benefits even when using their ordinary desktop telephones. Not only are traditional desktop phones easier to dial and to use than mobiles, but they do not raise the same health concerns associated with prolonged use of mobile handsets. Best of all, TeleAdapt has already reduced the cost of calls made to its mobile workers significantly. In fact, with the savings recorded in just the first three months, TeleAdapt could see that the unit had already paid for itself.
As well as benefiting from free calls to his mobile employees, Gordon is also pleased with the savings to be made when it comes to forwarding any incoming calls to his own mobile phone. Before, when he forwarded calls from his landline phone to his mobile, the company had to pay for the forwarded portion of the call, the final ‘jump’ between the landline and the mobile phone. Now, however, since Gordon can forward the call via the Desktop Mobile, it becomes a Vodafone mobile-to-mobile call, and is therefore free under the terms of the company’s Sharetime tariff.
“In addition to saving us money, the Desktop Mobile benefited us in another way: we phone each other a lot more,” Gordon added. “Whereas before we may have shied away from calling someone on his mobile if we could avoid it, now we pick up the phone and ring without even thinking about it. Communication with our salespeople has never been better.”
