Skype are attempting to aggressively target the business telephony market. While I can’t see the Skype application being taken seriously by large enterprise there certainly is a niche area for small or micro businesses.
Many small/micro businesses already use Skype as a cheap means of communication between each other and amongst there own employees. Small and micro businesses have several common elements that provide Skype with an ideal target market:
- They are very aggressive on cost control, making free internet calling very appealing.
- They often cluster with other small businesses via face to face networking, once the relationships have been established what better way to save costs than by phoning each other with Skype.
- Employees are often home based or mobile, making the use of Skype an inexpensive way of managing company employees via the calls and inbuilt IM.
- Finally they normally have limited IT skills, making Skype’s simplicity appealing and perhaps more importantly they have no existing telecoms/security/IT department ready to pounce on the Skype software.
I guess the one area I don’t understand large enterprise not using Skype is in the customer contact centre. All businesses should have freephone contact numbers, yet most in the UK don’t have free phone numbers. In fact most have non geographic numbers that cost consumers money and gain revenue for the business.
I’m sure a Skype button on large enterprise ‘contact us’ web page wouldn’t do any harm. In fact I’m sure the company would gain some good PR and more importantly kudos from a relatively small but growing number of Skype users.
