TeleWare, a provider of intelligent communication solutions to businesses and service providers, today announced the immediate availability of SMS capabilities for users of its intelligent Numbers, enabling text messages to be sent to a user's virtual number and have them delivered to their designated mobile phone or email inbox.
"We believe we are the first company in the mobile business area to overcome this problem," said Steve Haworth, CEO of TeleWare, "until now, the only approach that allowed full SMS capabilities on the mobile required separate mobile and landline numbers."
The separate mobile and fixed line number solutions compelled every business to issue their staff with at least two numbers for business – the mobile and the fixed line. This puts call control into the hands of the caller, as they select which number to use. Perhaps more importantly, it also means that, as employees move between organisations, their mobile numbers often moves with them and so their contact also moves away from the business.
With the new solution, a single intelligent Number is allocated by the business and the mobile private number can be used for private calls and SMS while the intelligent Number is used for all business calls and business SMS messages. Both numbers are live concurrently and SMS is fully operational.
This also means that all business calls to the intelligent Number will use the company's existing call control systems, such as auto attendants, corporate voicemail and alternative routing options, ensuring business calls are handled efficiently and cost effectively.
"The cost of generating an incoming call from a prospect will, typically, be in the region of £300 – £500 per call," explained Steve Haworth. "Companies are spending money generating sales prospects then risking losing that prospect through changes to sales staff or poor call control on mobile phone numbers. In the past companies had little choice but to give their employees multiple numbers since SMS is a business tool in today's increasingly mobile market. Today they have the choice, they can both receive SMS messages and have a business number that belongs to the business not the individual," added Haworth.
For employees representing multiple companies it is also possible to have multiple intelligent Numbers for voice calls and mobile calls on a single mobile handset so that they are informed as to which business they are answering for when taking a call. The SMS functionality is a fully integrated feature of intelligent Number and is part of TeleWare's operating system for their Telephony Server. It is available for immediate deployment by TeleWare On-premise customers as they upgrade to V11 or deploy a TeleWare Mobility Server and is already fully deployed to all TeleWare Hosted Services customers.