Skype for Business

On Wednesday, May 14th, the Skype for Business team is hosting an open-house showcase in the Skype Stockholm office. We are inviting our customers and anyone intersted to see how Skype can be used in a business.

Virtually the whole product range is presented and you can try the Skype certified products and get help from our staff. One of our businesss customers Lyx.com, has kindly agreed to tell how they use Skype.

This is also an opportunity for us to meet our customers and get feedback from you on how to improve our products and services. Your input is crucial in helping us help you.

Stop by Katarinavägen 5, by Slussen between 13.30 and 16.30 and say hi to the whole team!

There are plenty of online directories available for travellers looking to book a hotel room. But the difference with Voiceoverhotel.com is that all the hotels listed include their Skype Name, so you can make a free Skype to Skype call or start a Skype chat and speak to the hotel directly before you make your booking.

• Customers can call or chat with the hotel via Skype.

For businesses looking to differentiate themselves from the competition or any business that wants to make it easier for customers to contact them, adding a Skype Name or Skype Button to your website and email signature, means your customers can contact you for free at the click of a button.

With over 260million registered users around the world, some of your customers and potential customers are bound to be using Skype, so why not give them the option to contact you for free?

Today we have announced some new flat-rate calling subscriptions which provide great value calling to regular phones. The new subscriptions offer unlimited* calling to landlines in 34 countries as well as mobile phones in selected countries such as the US, Canada, Hong Kong, Singapore and China.

Skype to Skype calls continue to be free and unlimited, but now you can also call landlines without having to worry about time or cost. The new subscriptions cover almost a third of the world’s population (see a full list of countries). Depending on your location and calling destination, there are several subscription levels to choose from:

Continue reading "New flat-rate calling subscriptions from Skype are great for business" »

I’m pleased to announce some valuable new features have been added to the Business Control Panel

In case you are not already aware, the Business Control Panel is a free tool for managing Skype in your business. It is the easy way to purchase and manage Skype Credit and SkypeIn numbers within your company. And now it also makes it easier for you to help set up the rest of your co-workers on Skype.

Based on feedback from our business community we have added the following features:

• Easily invite co-workers (using a company email list).
• Create a members directory so employees know who else belongs to the same company.
• View itemised call reports for your members.
• Purchase up to €1,000 of Skype Credit at once.
• Automatically top-up your Control Panel credit balance

Please read on to find out more about each of these….

Continue reading "New features added to the Business Control Panel" »

We’ve just published the results of research commissioned by Skype, which looks at the behaviour and attitudes of European SME’s with regards to conference calling and video conferencing.

We have always felt that video calls and conference calls are great features for business users, but it was pleasing to hear it directly from the horse’s mouth. The businesses surveyed felt that the main benefits of these technologies include minimising travel, facilitating communication, improving communication and reducing costs. With video calling, the addition of non-verbal communication such as body language is also an important factor.

Many of the businesses surveyed who were not current users of video conferencing said they would be more likely to use it if it was better quality and not expensive. Again this was good to hear as Skype has been putting a lot of effort in to developing High Quality Video which launched earlier this year and apart from the cost of a webcam and a broadband internet connection, Skype video calls are free.

I just read this article on The Hollywood Reporter, about CNN using a Skype Video call to conduct an interview with an analyst who was on holidays in Maui at the time.

This is a great example of Skype video calling in action. In this case all they needed was a laptop computer and a borrowed webcam to set up a live video link from his hotel in Maui. You can read the whole article here

We are always interested in hearing interesting stories about businesses using Skype in creative ways. For instance, see this story about Rip Curl, the global surf and snowboard brand, whose staff use Skype Video calls to collaborate on designs from opposite sides of the globe.

If you have an interesting story about a business using Skype video calls, or any other Skype features, please get in touch via this blog, we would love to hear your story.

I am happy to announce that it is now again possible to purchase online numbers in Germany and France. This service has been unavailable for some time, but now we have solved the technical complexities. With a SkypeIn online number, you can always be reached wherever you are. Why have a number that only rings the phone at your desk? Bring it with you instead - all over the world.

As many of you have already experienced, we have recently made some improvements to the Control Panel to help you further manage the use of Skype in your business. A lot of these features are a direct result of feedback from you – so keep on telling us what you want. We have more improvements underway during 2008 and hope that you enjoy using Skype in your business.

Here is a short list of the things we have updated.

• Allocation reporting: see allocations per group, person or administrator for each month.

• User-centric management: Click on a user and all available settings are shown for that user on one single page.

• Start screen to help new users get up and running

• Improved grouping functionality and credit allocation for large groups of people at the same time.

• Users can now detach themselves from the Control Panel on their MyAccount page.

• E-mail notifications: administrators are notified if credit is running low within the Control Panel and other events

• Show CLI settings for SkypeIn numbers allocated within the Control Panel. (Coming soon)

• Ability to re-invite users who have not yet accepted.

• …and other minor changes that will improve load times and usability.

A reminder to all businesses based within the EU - by entering your EU VAT number, your purchases are VAT exempt.

PrettyMay Call Center for Skype (PMCCS) is a 100% software-based call center solution for Skype. It allows small or medium sized businesses to quickly and affordably implement a Skype PBX (aka PABX) system with auto-attendant, interactive voice response (IVR), extension transferring, call recording and personalized voicemail capabilities - and a lot more as well.

How does PMCCS work?

Your customers contact you by calling your Skype Name, a Skype Button displayed on your website, or a SkypeIn number , PMCCS automatically answers the call, and leads the caller into the built-in IVR system, then transfers the call to the appropriate agent or staff member depending on the button the caller pressed.

You can have up to 30 simultaneous Skype or SkypeIn lines supported with the PrettyMay Call Center for Skype. The diagram below shows how the system works for inbound calling.

Pretty May can also be used to route outbound calls via Skype. Find out more here

You can follow these step by step instructions to see how to set up and install Pretty May Call Center for Skype.

You can find out more by visiting the Pretty May Website

If you would like to find out how to get the best quality voice recordings using Skype, then check out this great audiovisual presentation prepared by Doug Kaye and Paul Figgiani at the Conversation Network.

This very detailed tutorial called ‘Skype for Interviews - A How-To Video’ contains a wealth of information. These guys really know their stuff. It’s over 20 minutes long so you may want to grab yourself a cup of coffee. But if you are interested in recording interviews using Skype so you can use them for podcasts, or if you just want to learn a bit more about how to improve voice quality, then it is well worth the time.