Skype: All Entrepreneurs Must Use Skype
Monday, January 4, 2010 | Written by Jacob Dearolph
Posted under: Bootstrapping, Uncategorized |
Tags: Communication, Costs, Phones, Saving Money, Skype |
10 Comments
As a person starting a business it is absolutely necessary to sell and to watch costs. Thus, you must use Skype for part of your phone services.
I just extended my Skype number for a year for $30.00. Basically, this is unlimited time on a phone to call any number in the US or within Skype. I can roll the line to any number I want. I get voicemail. All this for $2.50 a month. Nothing beats this.
If you have good internet access I would advise to switch immediately and start saving $$$.
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Posted under: Bootstrapping, Uncategorized | Tags: Communication, Costs, Phones, Saving Money, Skype | 10 Comments
10 Comments
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As a person who is watching costs, you had better keep your fingers crossed, hope and pray that a few very typical Skype things don’t happen to you:
- Skype decides to take away your Skype-In number, because they don’t like the contract they have made with the bulk provider of the numbers, as happened in London. How would you like to incur the costs of reprinting all of your business cards, letterhead, advertising materials, and anything else which had your phone number on it, just because someone else made a bad decision?
- Someone hacks into your Skype account, drains your credit, and starts causing general havoc with it – and when you try to contact Skype for help, they tell you it is your own fault for not being careful enough.
- Skype suffers a world-wide outage for several days, with no explanation. No incoming calls. No outgoing calls. Nothing.
- Someone discovers that Skype has allowed a tap to be inserted into their program, and everything you have been doing has been recorded and passed along to a third party. (Sound unlikely? Not only has this happened, it is still happening, with Skype’s blessing, in China. Skype has consistently refused to answer questions about whether this is done anywhere else in the world.)
- Suddenly Skype stops working on your computer, and you can’t figure out why. When you try to contact them for help, you discover that Skype, the phone service, doesn’t have telephone support. Nor email support. Nor fax. In fact, the only way to contact Skype for “support”, whether it be technical or commercial, is via a web page “trouble ticket” system, which has an expected response time of FOUR DAYS, and which in reality never meets even that ridiculous time frame. As likely as not you will never get a response, and even if you actually do the content is more than likely to be totally irrelevant, if not absolutely banal.
This is what you want to make your entrepreneurial business depend on? Good luck, and keep praying.
jw
JA –
I’ve been using Skype for the last year. One of my business partners has been using Skype over 2 years. We can all agree that their customer service is terrible. That being said I’ve had none of these other issues. I hope that you haven’t experienced all these issues happen and I hope you aren’t are a disgruntled employee.
To your points:
- The issue of Skype taking away numbers in London: I wonder if that could happen in the US. I don’t think they could get away with doing something like that.
- Hacking into your account and draining credit: I use Skype currently for a phone number for in/out calls domestically. It is a supplement to my cell phone. So there’s not credit to drain. I hope my account is never hacked.
- Never heard of a world wide outage. If so I have a cell phone.
- It is known that China controls internet access and use as well as forms of communication. This would be no surprise for Skype. Also, Skype is a business so the value derived from being in China is worth them having to put monitors in there system for their government.
- Skype not working on your computer: Probably an issue with your computer. First solution, Get a mac. I’ve never had any issues with Skype on my computer. I hope you got your problem resolved in any case.
So perhaps I should have provided a caveat that Skype is cheap and in most cases you get what you pay for. So if I’m paying $2.50 / month for a phone service I know my service and experience will be less than if I’m paying $50/month for ATT. I also know that I should not use Skype exclusively. That’s why I said it should be a part of one’s phone service.
JA,
One issue I have had is someone has figured out how to join my conference calls and talk a bunch conspiracy theory. I will say that was weird and a Skype issue.
Jacob
The Wall Street Journal reported this morning that Skype just signed deals with LG & Panasonic. These technology producers will begin rolling out hi-def TV’s with internet connection that will also include Skype’s service by the middle of 2010. These companies will begin selling webcams and microphones to make it possible to use Skype right in your living room on your big screen.
Hi Jacob, thanks for the additional comments. No, I am not a disgruntled former employee, but I am a very disgruntled former Skype user. Your basic conclusions are essentially correct, as a rule you do get what you pay for and in normal circumstances that is sufficient with Skype. But when something unusual happens, such as your account getting hacked, or for some other reason you suddenly find yourself in need of assistance or support from Skype (for example, you urgently need access while traveling and it doesn’t work), what you get from Skype is absolutely nothing. So you need to be aware of that, and prepared to accept it – which is why I originally said, “make sure you know what you are playing you-bet-your-business” with.
As for the worldwide four day Skype outage, it certainly did happen, and Skype never even bothered to give an adequate (or even plausible) explanation to their users. Do a web search for something like “worldwide skype outage”, and you will get plenty of information on it.
Skype customers in London didn’t think that it would be possible for Skype to simply take away their SkypeIn numbers, either, but that was exactly what they did. The impact on a lot of small businesses was very severe. Once again, this is why I say, make sure you know who you are dealing with when setting up a business.
The worst cases of hacking/draining accounts involved situations where there was an automatic connection to a PayPal account. Now that Skype has been dumped by eBay, that might not even be possible any more. But in any case, make sure that you could deal with having whatever money you put into Skype suddenly disappear forever.
In fact, keeping a backup phone of some sort is imperative, not only for the reasons outlined above but also because you can not call 911 using Skype. Skype continually does everything in their power to avoid being classified as a telephone company or a “common carrier”, specifically to avoid having to comply with emergency dialing requirements.
Finally, having someone hack into conference calls is common, and is one symptom of a much larger problem. Skype space is infested with pornographers, spammers and con artists, and they often pop up in the most inconvenient situations. Skype themselves show no interest in doing anything about this, I suspect in large part because the thousands of new Skype accounts they set up every day make a very substantial contribution to Skype’s vastly inflated “registered user” accounts. When you read about Skype having “500 million registered users”, or whatever ridiculous number they are passing off these days, try to pin someone down on it – ask them how many of those are “active” accounts, or how many have never been used, how many have been used one time and abandoned, and the like. Another simple way to see where the problem comes from is to just ask Skype how to cancel an account. The answer is, you can’t. It’s impossible. So whatever number they are bandying about, it is the total number of accounts that have been created since the first day Skype became available, regardless of how, what or how many times they have been used.
To get back to the subject at hand, it seems to me that when you are trying to build a new business, you need to have reliable partners and services to build it on. The more you look at Skype, and peek behind the curtain a bit, the less attractive they look. So if you are going to use them as an important part of your start-up, you had better make sure you are well protected, and prepared for some significant risks.
jw
JA,
I’ve enjoyed this dialogue thanks for your comments. I believe they will really help other business owners and entrepreneurs as they evaluate possible phone services.
I did a quick google search of Skype outage here’s one link: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Orchant/?p=548. It appears that it happened around mid-August of 2007. Some speculated it had something to do with a Windows update. In any case that would definitely be a hindrance. I was with a company once and our email was down for 4-5 days. The IT guys had completely messed up.
You certainly have done your fair share of research on Skype as well as having your own experience with them. You actually have me wondering if I should stay with them. What phone service are you using now? Are you still using some type of VOIP system? I’m curious for myself and for the readers of this blog. We are constantly staying up on how entrepreneurs run their businesses so your experience will be very helpful.
Also, what type of business do you own/run?
Getting back to Skype and their size and lack of quality control and customer service. My guess is that when it is valuable for them to have some semblance of quality control and customer service they will implement it. This would be similar to eBay. Right now Skype doesn’t have to worry about it. They are focusing on growth and technology and could careless about the individual consumer. See my blog on Turbo Tax on this (http://bit.ly/8Jlbw9 – read toward the end before the email). Basically it doesn’t pay for Skype to care about the customer at this point. I believe it will hurt them in the long run as competitors take market share away.
[...] blogged about Skype before (see link to my blog) and had an interesting conversation with an entrepreneur about his experience with Skype. I use [...]
Hi Jacob,
Sorry, I was away for a while, and just got back to catch up on this thread… Thanks for taking the time to continue the conversation. My first question to you, given the events of the past 24 hours or so, is what do you think about Skype, their service, reliability, support and communication now? I will say again, so that there can be no misunderstanding, I no longer use Skype, and I do not even allow it to be installed on any of my systems or the ones I am responsible for. So I don’t know if the “Sign In” problem has been fixed yet or not. The last thing posted in the “Skype Heartbeat Blog” is
“As soon as I have more information, I’ll update this post.”
Since then, not a word – which is typical of the way Skype treats their customers. If I were to guess at this point, I would say that it is probably working again, or we would be hearing a lot more public outcry about it, and further I would guess that there will never be any sort of plausible explanation given by Skype, their typical mode of operation in these cases is to hunker down, shut up, and wait for the fuss to blow over.
Before going on to a few of the other points you mentioned, I would like to suggest that you also do a web search for information concerning Skype suddenly canceling thousands of London phone numbers – something like “Skype 0207 London” should yield plenty of results. Read about what they did, how they did it, how they treated their customers, and the explanation they gave for it all. Then, again, consider whether you want to use Skype as an important part of your business. I find this particular incident to be much more troubling than the four-day outage, to be honest. Any technical company can suffer a failure, the problem with the Skype outage was that they took so long to fix it, and they never explained it. But this episode was a management decision that was clearly made with full awareness of the impact it would have on their customers, and they simply didn’t care. I find that extremely troubling.
I do not own or operate my own business. I first came into contact with Skype because of some family crises, and I was very impressed with it. My family is literally spread around the globe, and Skype made it a lot easier for all of us to get through a very difficult time. I subsequently encouraged several world-wide charitable organizations I have been involved with to try Skype, and I became quite active in the Skype User Forums, which was (and still is) the only hope a Skype user has of getting any kind of competent technical assistance. It was in those forums that I started to see the way Skype operates, and how they treat their customers. Then the outage came along, then the London 0207 fiasco, and I decided I had seen enough. My preferred VoIP service was Gizmo5, but they were recently taken over by Google, and it is still not clear what is going to come out of that. I now make extensive use of ooVoo, which I consider to be the best alternative to Skype, both in terms of service and support, and I have made some use of TokBox.
When I first started blogging about these problems with Skype, their COO at the time actually commented on one of my blog posts, claiming that they had a new “Customer Service Manager”, and offering to set up a Skype call with him so that they could explain how they were going to address these problems. I declined, saying that I had seen and heard enough explanations, and that whatever concrete actions I saw (or didn’t see) would be what I was waiting for. Needless to say, there has been essentially no change since then, and although I don’t recall the specific date, that was certainly over 18 months ago.
I used to have the same feeling that you did, that Skype would do something about Customer Service when it became valuable or otherwise important to them. I have since become convinced that this is not the case, it will never be valuable enough for them to do something about. That is a very sad situation for those who continue to learn the hard way what dealing with Skype can be like. There are a few glimmers of hope, such as the recent court case which Skype lost, over their policy of simply claiming whatever money you have in your Skype account if you don’t make a chargeable call for six months.
Thanks again for carrying on an interesting conversation about this. I will close with the same advice I give to my friends when they inquire about Skype. I choose to absolutely avoid it, no matter what. But that is a choice. If you choose otherwise, I hope that you at least make that choice with full knowledge of the risks and consequences, and of Skype’s actions in the past related to service and support. I can honestly understand private individuals who use Skype, when their use falls in the category of “well, if it doesn’t work that’s not a huge problem for me”, and they make certain that they never risk any money in a Skype Out account. But I am always amazed at businesses, large and small, who are willing to risk credibility, and in some cases even their existence, on a company with Skype’s track record.
Regards,
jw
A few years ago, I lived and worked in Peru and used Skype for a business I set up in Lima. Through Skype, I purchased an Atlanta-based phone number. Whenever someone called that Atlanta number from the USA, the call would go directly to my laptop in Peru and nobody had any idea that I was answering the call in Peru using Skype. In fact, most people were surprised at the clarity of the call when I advised I was using Skype in Peru. And as long as the person called the Atlanta phone number, I was not charged. I was only charged $0.02/minute when I made the phone call.
This was a great option to make business calls and to stay in touch with family. If you are living abroad, set up a USA-based telephone number through Skype for your clients, family, and friends who don’t use Skype.
I’m currently working with a client who wants to use Skype for their business line. Their main holdup is the difficulty of checking Skype voicemail when away from a computer. Here are some solutions I presented for this problem:
SpinVox
For $0.25 a message, this solution converts the voicemail to a text message and is sent to your cell phone. You could then read the message and receive the call-back number by text message.
http://www.skype.com/allfeatures/voicemail-to-text/
Amperor
Connects your landline & answering machine to Skype. So you could call into your home landline to receive messages left on your Skype phone number. This may be redundant if you already have a land line.
http://www.amperordirect.com/pc/r-skype-voip/help-skype-voicemail-away-home.html
Mobile Devices
Skype works on the iPhone, select Blackberry devices, and the Android phone. I can check skype voicemail on my iPhone through a wi-fi connection.
http://www.skype.com/mobile/