SPECIAL FEATURE:
It's time for business cellular to be born!

By Jim Youngquist

[August 02, 2012]  Besides becoming somewhat more reliable, cellular phone communication has changed little since its inception. It is bland, lifeless, primitive, featureless and operates at its lowest possible functional level. Business cellular is the same as personal cellular and is equally feature-deficient. It is time for the cellular phone companies to wake up and reshape their cellular business-phone offerings to entice corporate America to abandon the last vestige of land-line phones for feature-rich cellular, and make more money doing it.

Businesses currently rely on a combination of land-line and VoIP offerings to control communications within their companies. They are tethered to a wire that keeps them from their full potential. There is a significant technological divide between the wired-phone systems and cellular phones that make the latter an adopted stepson in the business sense because of a lack of features. Attaining the same features as those offered on the wire would allow businesses to rise to a new level and unite behind a new feature-rich cellular platform.

Adding business-related features would merely be a matter of programming for cellular providers. With a few lines of code specific to business accounts, cellular business users could experience a wide range of features unheard of on the cellular phone platform that they currently enjoy on their in-house multi-line phone systems. The features of business cellular should take advantage of the features of the cellular phones.

Currently cellular phones exist in a singularly solo dimension. There is nothing that relates them to each other except the billing. A good beginning to establish business cellular would be to group cellphones that are related to each other within a business or organizational account. These relationships would be created and controlled on the cell company's website and would be segmented by customer account. Company IT people would assign the relationships and functionality. With the relationship and naming of each phone would come the ability to bring enhanced functionality and relatedness.

Most cellphone companies limit account size to five phones. Business cellular should allow account sizes to grow beyond the five-phone limitation to provide for business functionality with small, medium and large businesses. A business with 1,000 service representatives should be able to operate within one cellular business account to provide customer service within a related network.

Here are five functional recommendations for business cellular.

The first function in any business-phone network is the ability to have automated or centralized answering on behalf of the group. Centralized answering allows the caller to hear the offerings and be transferred to the right department or person to have their needs met. Business cellular should immediately structure the ability of each business cellular account to have centralized answering. Since voice mail currently exists with all cellphone providers, it would be a short step to change network programming from voice mail to centralized or automated answering and switching.

Switching would allow the call to go to the cellphone user within the company who is representing the department, function or service that the caller desires. The call should be transferred cleanly without the caller knowing that it is business cellular rather than a traditional multi-land-line system. And if the person desired is not available, the caller should be able to choose within a phone tree whether to talk to someone else, be transferred back to the operator or leave voice mail. Business cellular should integrate with existing in-house multi-land-line and VoIP systems to allow for the highest functionality despite the restrictions of geography.

The second functionality business cellular should provide is the ability to transfer a call. All the members of the business cellular network should have an interrelatedness that allows them to put a call on hold, contact another member seamlessly and transfer the call on hold to that member. All this can be accomplished easily and seamlessly within the programming of the business cellular network. These coding principles already exist in a multitude of business phone systems and servers such as Asterisk and could easily be adopted and ported to business cellular.

The third ability should be to conference calls easily and seamlessly. Conferences of more than three phones should be accomplished easily with business cellular and make remote business meetings and deals possible. The advent of the iPhone and FaceTime has recently brought the dream of the video phone to life. Business cellular should enhance and adopt the principles of FaceTime to effectively provide video conferencing to the business cellular market, using both Wi-Fi networks and cellphone networks employing smartphone features.

The fourth ability should be easily accomplished as well. Business cellular users should be able to transfer voice mail messages to each other. Perhaps some cellphones currently provide that ability, but it should be a standard business cellular feature.

The final feature on the list should be the ability to record phone calls on business cellular and transfer the recordings to either a central location or any other business cellular user in the network. Recordings provide essential details within a phone conversation, and a business cellular phone user should be able to say, "Hey, hang on a minute. I want to get a recording of this conversation if it's OK with you."

As business cellular begins to offer these features to the business market and more development happens, more features will likely be invented and offered. Businesses will transition from being controlled by land-line-locked locale to being set free in geography, reach and scope. It is certainly time for business cellular to be invented, features integrated and migrated, and for the freedom of wireless to attain the feature-richness of wired phone networks. Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint and U.S. Cellular could reap a windfall for being first to the table with some more mature offerings.

We're waiting!

[By JIM YOUNGQUIST]