BlackBerry Mobile Voice System: Mobile Savings and Productivity Benefits
In a tough economic climate, every company is looking to cut expenditures and improve efficiencies. BlackBerry® Mobile Voice System (BlackBerry MVS) can help you achieve both these goals—it can allow you to reduce mobile voice fees by utilizing smarter call routing and increase employee productivity by unifying the enterprise desk phone with the mobile smartphone.
Designed for mid- and large-sized companies, BlackBerry MVS is middleware that serves as a gateway between the BlackBerry® Enterprise Server and your company’s enterprise phone system (Private Branch Exchange or PBX). You can think of it as extending the same benefits to voice that the BlackBerry® Enterprise Solution already provides for your company’s email and data. BlackBerry MVS allows each employee to be accessed by a single enterprise phone number that rings both their workplace desk phone and BlackBerry® smartphone. Missed work calls will be consolidated into a single voicemail box.
How BlackBerry MVS can help reduce costs
Without BlackBerry MVS, when an employee places a call from a mobile phone, they are charged at the mobile carrier’s rate for outgoing calls. For many businesses, international calls and roaming charges are a major expense. With BlackBerry MVS, the direction of mobile calls can be reversed—instead of originating from the smartphone, BlackBerry MVS acts as a middleman, arranging it so that your corporate PBX initiates the call, connecting the smartphone and the intended recipient. This is one area of potential cost savings because although employees are still using cell minutes, they are not initiating the call.
What does this mean for your business? When employees dial from their work number on their BlackBerry smartphones they are being billed at the rate for an incoming call from their corporate PBX, which can reduce roaming fees and long-distance costs by as much as a factor of ten. (However, if employees choose to make a call from their personal number on their smartphone, they are still billed at the normal rate for an outgoing call.) This technology, invisible to the end user, can have a dramatic effect on your company’s mobility budget.
Mobile Voice Security
By using the BlackBerry MVS, you provide your employees’ mobile calls with the same best-in-class security that already keeps your business email and data transfers safe.
Because BlackBerry MVS is deployed with BlackBerry Enterprise Server, all calls are authenticated with the BlackBerry Enterprise Server’s industry-leading encryption, ensuring that only authorized calls are connected to your company’s PBX.
The BlackBerry MVS network-agnostic architecture means that no matter which mobile carrier you use, BlackBerry MVS can work for you. And because all calls can be routed through the PBX, it’s easier to log employee calls in order to keep track of billable hours, ensure corporate compliance and prevent misuse.
One Phone Number, One Voicemail Box
BlackBerry MVS increases employee productivity: One phone number, which rings both a desk phone and a BlackBerry smartphone, means fewer missed calls, fewer missed opportunities and easier collaboration with colleagues. If an employee misses a work call, voicemail is consolidated into one voicemail box, eliminating the need to dial into both their desk phone and BlackBerry smartphone to get all of their office voicemails. Employees will spend less time checking and responding to messages, allowing quicker responses to missed calls.
A single enterprise phone number for each of your employees means they won’t have to conduct business on a personal cell phone. Because all contact information is held on company hardware—the corporate BlackBerry smartphone and, most likely, the corporate mail system the phone syncs with—you maintain control of this information after an employee leaves, making transitions much more seamless.
With BlackBerry MVS, employees have access to office desk phone functionality from anywhere, including dialing by name or by extension, the ability to easily block or allow phone numbers and fast transfers by extension. It also eliminates the confusion that stems from having multiple phone numbers: Employees don’t have to juggle multiple numbers or decide when to give out their personal cell numbers.
A User-Friendly, Integrated Solution
BlackBerry MVS integrates the desk phone and the smartphone functionality in a user-friendly manner. There are no special applications to download or run, and all desk phone functionality is integrated directly into the BlackBerry smartphone’s menu system. Here are some shots of BlackBerry MVS in action:
BlackBerry MVS allows administrators to add employees’ personal mobile devices to the system, so an employee can toggle between an enterprise line for business calls and a personal line for when they are off the job. This feature can also be disabled, causing the phone to always connect through the enterprise line and the PBX for greater accountability and manageability. This is particularly important in areas such as finance, in which regulatory agencies may require the logging of all calls.
Just like your desk phone, a BlackBerry MVS–enabled BlackBerry smartphone can dial by extension or directly from your corporate directory.
When you receive an enterprise call through BlackBerry MVS, the caller’s name shows up on your BlackBerry smartphone just like it would on your desk phone. The display will also indicate which line (enterprise or personal) you are being called at so that you can answer the call accordingly.
The BlackBerry MVS seamlessly integrates desk phone functionality into the BlackBerry smartphones menu. Here, we see how an employee can transfer a call to a different extension—just as they would on their desk phone—through a simple menu option.
Finally, BlackBerry MVS does more than just let you access desk phone functions on your BlackBerry smartphone; it also allows you to move calls from your desk phone to your smartphone and vice versa.
The Benefits of BlackBerry MVS
The BlackBerry MVS can help reduce costs by providing low-cost call routing (based on a company’s PBX rates from their carrier) to help reduce roaming and long-distance fees. Secure integration of desk phones and smartphones allows for greater manageability and accountability. Additionally, BlackBerry MVS can enhance employee productivity, streamlining workflow by providing users with a single enterprise phone number and consolidated voicemail box to complement the single email mailbox that the BlackBerry Enterprise Solution already offers.
To view a demo video of BlackBerry MVS in action, click here. To learn more, visit the BlackBerry Mobile Voice System website.
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