Last month KLR Consulting was approached by Rapport Corporate Calling Cards to try out their calling card and to comment on the applicability of this offering for teleworkers. The following review reflects the author's personal assessment and opinions.
Calling cards have gained notoriety over the past few years. They are most commonly used by travelers for making long distance phone calls. In recent years phone card vendors have enhanced their services to provide much more than long distance.
The Rapport Corporate Calling Card is one such card operating in this expanded market. Rapport is a division of BCS Technology Inc. BCS is a Canadian owned and operated company with its head office in Vancouver, British Columbia. BCS has been in business since 1985 and has built its business on advanced call processing technology which routes telephone traffic through a BCS telephone switch facility.
The calling card comes with several basic features you would expect and several potentially exciting features which are announced as "available in the near future". The features currently working include long distance, speed dial, voice mail, message broadcast, fax mail, message notification and call redirection. Users of the card are provided with a personal phone number which will ring either directly at the BCS telephone computer or at a phone number identified by the user.
Teleworkers can, of course, benefit from several of these options. First of all, voice mail is a mandatory for teleworkers and can be used when the teleworker is working from home or at the central office. Unfortunately, the voice mail does not directly connect to the other corporate voice mail systems (see article in this issue on Universal Messaging) but is an alternative to buying a voice mail box from the local telephone utility for each teleworkers home office. The speed dial is particularly useful for teleworkers who are dialing long complex numbers to reach out-of-town contacts. The Rapport Card can store up to 10 speed dial numbers which should accommodate most teleworkers.
The most significant benefit of Rapport's card for teleworkers is the fax mail feature. Teleworkers can have faxes sent to them without having to do the teleworker's "fax jig" -- where teleworkers must be notified that a fax is coming, set their modem up to accept the fax and then not answer the phone when it rings hoping that it is indeed a fax. Instead the teleworker can merely retrieve the fax from the telephone switch at a time that is convenient for the teleworker. I should mention that I tried this feature on several occasions and had some difficulty in getting it to work -- the Rapport explanation is that of the challenge of making fax machines of different vintages communicate with each other.
The call redirection feature is also appropriate for teleworkers. This feature allows you to transfer incoming calls to your personal number to any phone to meet your specific needs. This feature could be used by teleworkers who share space in the traditional office. The employee would use their Rapport personal number as the primary number people call to reach them and would merely program the phone switch to redirect the call to the phone number in the office they will be using on non-teleworking days. This can solve one of the largest challenges of sharing space -- trying to get your phone to ring in a shared office. Again, I tried this feature with some success. The system is different than traditional call forwarding as you first get the voice mail greeting and then are asked to wait a moment while the system redirects your call -- this might confuse some callers so your voice message must be clear that a delay will occur. One feature that I particularly liked was the ability to find out what number you were call forwarded to. I personally have five phone so this feature was very helpful.
The card also has a several services which are to be available in the near future. These include conference calling, fax broadcast, e-mail to fax and voice recognition. The conference calling feature will help teleworkers while the voice recognition features will help those who are mobile workers accessing their messages from their vehicles.
The system is priced to make it affordable for most users. Voice mail is provided at no charge, fax mail, speed dial, message notification and call redirection are provided at $10 per month. The long distance is provided at rates that are competitive with other industry players.
The bottom-line is that this type of solution might be of interest to your organization. Teleworkers and mobile workers could potentially benefit.
CONTACT:
Ken Robertson
KLR Consulting Inc.
phone: (604) 294-2292
e-mail: ken.robertson@klr.com
Richard Katrusiak
Rapport Corporate Calling Card
phone: (604) 684-8018
(888) 241-CARD
e-mail: llyall@direct.ca
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