I have been spending some time lately thinking of how my company can offer more value to our services without incurring a large cost to ourselves. As an accounting company that caters mainly to small businesses, we have clients that generally require more than the standard services.

This led us to provide domains and mail hosting as a small service which caught on really well. The cost is minimal as we do the hosting in house on a Gentoo machine with the domains hosted at Godaddy.

Following on with the theme, I’m happy to say that we know offer our clients the ability to call us on Skype. Within the next few days, a Skype Me button will be appearing on our site and clients or prospective clients can call our offices at now charge. At the moment we’re using the call forwarding ability of Skype to do this but by next week, using hardware, the call will come over the net and straight into our PBX without incurring us any cost. Call forwarding will still be enabled in the case of our internet connection being down. I’m pretty happy with this and I like the concept of VOIP being an enabling technology and bringing us closer to our customers.

On another note, Netgear finally released their Skype phone using an embedded version of the software. I posted on this a while back and I can’t wait to get my hands on one.