Hi y'all-
Yes, more work and an expanding service radius. This is good, dotcom crash over, economy back to normal.
The way to solve this one is to include the modem card in every switch (much nicer than trying to fiddle with an external modem on the PBX), and include an external modem on every voicemail system (except TVS-325, which thankfully has an option for a built-in modem).
These things add to first-cost to clients, but the way to show it's worth the price, is to offer a reduced rate for remote service, and show the client how fast the modems are going to pay for themselves. Also, you can get clients sending in change-requests via email, and do them overnight from your home office, or same-day or even "within the hour" during the day. From the client's perspective it's almost like having a tech on site fulltime.
So now you gain on a bunch of levels: reduced fuel consumption and related costs; increased productive time vs. unproductive time sitting in the stop-and-go; and the ability to work on clients' machines overnight, adding further to productive hours.
Clients gain from lower cost of routine changes, and faster response times, both of which are significant factors over the life of the system.
If you set your remote-service rates and minimum time blocks right, the result should be more income for you due to increased volume of work *and* less cost to clients because they can pay for smaller time-increments. That's a perfect win-win, just like telecommuting in general.
A couple of things to note:
On large KXTDA-200s (e.g. 100 phones and up), when you go into the Extensions screens, expect to wait about 10 minutes for the database to download to your computer. There are other places in the switch that behave similarly. Keep track of the screens that take a long time to download (and upload after you've entered your changes) and use that as a guide to prioritizing your programming when you're logged into a machine.
The VT-100 terminal window and command-line programming make KXTVSs fast to work on even at 9600 baud. This also makes it cross-platform, so you can run a terminal app on a Mac or Linux machine right next to your Windows PC running the Panasonic tool for the KXTDAs. For those of us who run "all three" operating systems, it makes things go faster since we can go into a PBX on one machine and a TVS on another, and do both simultaneously. Program voicemail whilst waiting for the KXTDA databases to load, for example.
Passwords, passwords, passwords. As soon as you put a modem on a PBX or voicemail system, you're open to the risk that some baddie will break in and make the machine reroute calls or message-notifications to Timbuktu and run up your client's phone bill $20K in a weekend. Use strong passwords, change them often, DO NOT EVER send a password via unencrypted email, etc. etc.
-George Gleason, PBX Engineer Cooperative Digital 510-843-2667 extn 205
"Give a hoot - Telecommute!"
On 17 Jan, 2005, at 6:13 PM, Henry C Robertelli wrote:
With the advent of TDAs, I am getting more and more work that is 80 to 100 miles beyond our normal service area....
_________________________________________________________________ KX-T Mailing list --- http://kxthelp.com/ Subscription changes: http://kxthelp.com/mailman/listinfo/kxt
