One service we provide at my company, Charisma Sciences, is phone coaching. Guys call us from all over the world and we used to just give out our cell phone numbers. This worked for some time but we were losing some international customers. Then I discovered Skype.
Skype is a piece of free, peer-to-peer software that lets you make calls over your computer. And it works really well. Said Michael Powell, Chairman of the FCC, “When the inventors of KaZaA are distributing for free a little program that you can use to talk to anybody else, and the quality is fantastic, and it’s free – it’s over. The world will change now inevitably.”
Unlike KaZaa, Skype does not make its money off of adware or spyware. This is the cool part – you can buy numbers in places like the U.S., London, Hong Kong and the Netherlands, for about $4.50 a month, that will all ring to your computer. You can also buy credits to make outbound calls from your computer to anywhere in the world for something like 2 cents a minute. Skype-to-skype calls sounds exceptional – its like talking to Jeff and Rich right in the radio booth – and Skype-to-phone calls sound better than regular phone calls. I also spent an extra $15 for software called HOTRecorder that lets me record all of the calls and convert them into MP3s, so our clients have archives of our conversations.
Sometimes I discover these little tools that make it so much easier to do old business in new ways. If you know of any such tools, I’d love to hear about them!
