Qwest Communications today announced enhancements to and an expansion of its OneFlex VoIP product portfolio designed to make the products easier to use and to add more functions for VoIP customers.

The enhancements, which affect both Qwest’s OneFlex Hosted VoIP and Integrated Access products, include the ability to use compression to fit more voice calls and more data onto existing services, an escape-to-operator feature that allows callers to hit “0” and leave voice mail for a live attendant and a new portal feature that lets businesses divide up responsibility for administering subgroups of employees, regardless of location.

These features can be easily administered through the user portal that Qwest provides, enabling greater flexibility, which lets customers use their services more efficiently, said Thuy Ha, director of product management for Enterprise Local Voice, VoIP and Hosting Solutions at Qwest.

“We developed these features based on feedback from our customers,” Ha said. “They have asked us what more can they do so they can continue to get cost savings out of the service or simplify it even further, so we have given them more control in the portal.”

For example, a business can set the escape-to-operator function so that calls go to different people at different times or days, and it can set up the sub-office administrator hierarchy so that setting individual features can be a delegated task.

“We provide customers with an office administrator portal through which they can log in and manage their communications needs,” Ha said. “Our hosted VoIP customer can manage their end users – configure templates, decide where end users have certain capabilities, like the ability to make long-distance calls. We’ve heard from customers, as they are growing and have more locations, they want to be able to assign other people the capability of subset control.”

Jeff Randolph, president of Randolph & Associates, a 15-person engineering and land-survey firm in Peoria, Ill., signed on as a OneFlex Integrated Access customer because Qwest could offer him voice and data services over a T-1 link at less money than he had been paying and deliver some additional features as well.

“We had a T-1 for communications, but we shrunk a little bit in [number of people],”
he said. “When we channelized that T-1 and went integrated access, we didn’t see any reduction in data, and it didn’t bother the phone system. We got new phones, everything updated for less money than we are paying. We dropped six voice lines.”

More importantly, as a company that works for multiple customers, including the Illinois Department of Transportation, Randolph & Associates was able to link voice mail with its email system so that customer voice mails, many of which contain instructions or other important details, can be attached and stored with job files for easy reference.

“Unlike with an email or a written message, you have the voice inflection and hear what the customer is talking to you about,” Randolph said. “You can hear if they are happy or they are upset.”

As a company with a policy of always answering the phone, Randolph kept its office manager busy, he added. With new direct-dial components, however, all personal calls can go directly to the individual and not through the operator, “and that has cut my office manager’s job in half,” he said.

Ha expects Qwest to continue enhancing and adding features, and sees customers looking beyond the immediate cost savings of VoIP to the additional functionality and productivity it can provide.