Old-School Phones Aren’t Dead – We Just Got Rid of the Handsets

WGMD Business Spotlight Featuring ThinkSecureNet - Episode 7/22/21

Interviewer: Let me welcome to WGMD studios some smart guys from ThinkSecureNet. They are here in the studio now to talk about how communicating with your customers in this day and age has changed.

Jack Berberian is the co-founder and CEO of ThinkSecureNet, and Mark is the Vice President of Sales. Gents, thanks for being here today, and nice to meet you in person. How are you doing?

Jack: Good. Thank you very much for having us. 

Interviewer: It’s my pleasure. Mark, you there? Where’s Mark? If you went on a break, we’ll be speaking with Mark at some point extremely soon. 

Now then, Jack, virtually every business has a phone system. Tell us what is different about what ThinkSecureNet offers.

Jack: Absolutely. Let’s begin with traditional phone systems. You buy a server PBX or some type of device that you’re putting on the premises itself. So, you have hardware, you have licensing, you have voicemail cards, and all kinds of other things that you have to purchase to operate your phone system at the office. 

This means every time you have a change that you need to make, or you have an issue, somebody needs to come out. You have a two-hour minimum fee; there’s labor involved; and every time you need to make a change, they need to come out to your phone system to make that change. 

Also, there’s a phone number associated with every phone line traditionally. So, every time you have a busy season, you end up adding two or three phone lines, and then you never take them off. And every one of those phone lines comes with a two or three-year contract. It gets expensive over time. The longer you’ve been in business, the more you’re paying for those phones, and the more money you’ve spent on hardware and labor. 

We have something called TSN voice that we have been deploying out in Delaware and in about 20 different states for the last ten years. Most of the businesses that you call today in Delaware — including healthcare facilities, restaurants, furniture stores, gas stations — a lot of the places you call are already on our platform. You would just never know it. 

And we’re going to go through some of the reasons why they continue to have that system and why we still have 98% of our customers. We even offer something called softphones, which is basically all the same functions and features you would use as a regular phone, but you don’t need an actual handset, so you don’t have to pay for the actual handset itself. You can just have a Bluetooth device. You can use your laptop, your desktop, your cell phone, and it will work just like a regular desk phone at work. The megatrend in telephone communication is kind of away from the handset.

Interviewer: Yes. Okay. All right.

Jack: One of our core values at the company is community. And I think the team and the organization have done a tremendous job at being part of that community. So, during these broadcasts, we’d like to highlight some of the organizations that we are supporting. 

This month we have donated to Patriot Point. It is something that you may not have heard of, but it’s an organization that makes a facility available over in Maryland for veterans that have been injured and their families to come to spend a couple of weeks and enjoy themselves.

The other organization is Tunnel to Towers. There’s going to be a benefit coming up in September for the twentieth anniversary of September 11. We were big sponsors of that, and we’re organizing our team to be there as well. 

That’s just two of the organizations, but I think we’ve literally helped hundreds of organizations over the last 13–14 years.

Interviewer: Outstanding. Mark Kosloski, VP of Sales, are you with us now? 

Mark: I’m ready. 

Interviewer: Let me ask you, what is called bursting technology?

Mark: So, with traditional phone systems, you buy one line at a time, and every single phone line that you have is tied to a phone number. If you have a busy season, let’s say you’re a pizza shop, and you’re busy in the summer. You have to buy extra lines. Every time you buy a line, you’re adding to that phone bill. Basically, what you’re doing is you’re just continuing to add to your monthly costs.

What our system does is you pay for your, let’s say, core number phone lines that you would be using. And then, in the summer months, when you are extremely busy, our system will virtually burst another call path. We’ll add another phone line virtually to your system so that those customers can keep calling you. And then, when you’re done with it, when your volume decreases at the end of that month, that season will drop back off your bill automatically so that you’re not paying for that additional call path forever, which is how the phone companies traditionally make money. 

Interviewer: Okay. So, in other words, it sounds to me like you have basically figured out a way to add additional telephonic capability for your customers without having to hardwire things the way a phone company would traditionally have done it. 

Mark: That’s right. Our systems are all off-premise. They’re all in the cloud. The only thing in your office is a router. And if you have handsets phones on your desk, those are the only two things you actually have in your office. Everything else is monitored, managed, and secured by our team.

People in your customer’s offices can actually be moving around, physically inside the office, going from one position to another, but they’ll have a Bluetooth receiver in their ears. 

Interviewer: Like almost everybody does nowadays, right? And they can answer phone calls without having to sit at a desk and pick up a handheld receiver?

Mark: That’s correct. 

Interviewer: That’s good. You represent, really, a cutting-edge level of telephonic technology. You’re going to be able to change everything for your customers. If they stick with a traditional phone-company type of technology, they would not be able to do that’s right. Good for you. That’s amazing. 

Mark: Yeah, we call it omnichannel solutions. The reason we call it that is it’s not just phones anymore. The capabilities that come with the system allow you to text, email, and also live chat online, and they’re all integrated. So, let’s say you get a call from a customer, and you’re not able to get a hold of them when you call them back. You can simply just send them a text message right there on your screen, and they can reply right back to you on that text message as well. And all of that information is unified, and all of that reporting is available and transparent to your organization. A lot of organizations have to request reports or go to a different portal to get reports. It’s always a nightmare. All of the same toolsets that our team uses are available to you as a business owner.

So, you can go in there, and you can see who’s answering calls; how many customers you’ve lost; how many customers are being put on hold; how long they’re on hold; how many of your team members are transferring calls to other people instead of answering the call. It gives you a good baseline to figure out if you have room for improvement because, typically, phone data goes unnoticed. There’s no way to actually look at it. There’s no way to actually put it in a report with traditional phone systems unless you have a huge upgrade with new hardware and, you know, that’s very expensive.

Interviewer: Sounds like you have a way now. 

Mark: That’s correct. 

Interviewer: I don’t know about you, but I get bogus phone calls all the time. At first, I would answer, and there’d be nobody there. Sometimes I would hear a recording in Mandarin, or Cantonese, or some Chinese nonsense. So I’ve stopped. I’m guessing that you may have a way to completely block out that stuff to make sure that your customers don’t get hit or don’t get hacked.

Mark: Yes. There’s a couple of different things that are going on right now. One of the things that we do is we put a firewall between the phones and the internet. If you don’t have something protecting your phones, and you have voice over internet protocol (VoIP) phones, you’ll get spammed constantly. So I would say 98% of that is all filtered out, and you would never even know it’s there.

Let’s say that you have two or three that dodge through because sometimes they are legitimate folks calling from their own home that are paid to make those calls. We can tag those calls and block them immediately, whether they’re national or international. 

So there are all kinds of ways to actually block that out. But you are correct. The vast majority of those robocalls would just get wiped out. They’ve got to be because a company can be destroyed literally through their phone system. If it is connected to their computer system — and almost everybody’s is — a virus can destroy it.

Some of your callers may know about this story. They get bills from the phone company, and it’s in the thousands and thousands of dollars because what they do is they’ll log in. You don’t have any filters; you don’t have any protection. They just log in, take over that phone, and start making calls internationally from that number. Now you have an issue of liability. You have a phone bill that the phone company wants you to pay. I’m sure most of your callers have heard about it already, but it’s happening more and more.

Interviewer: Unbelievable. Unbelievable. What a destructive and horrible world. But ThinkSecureNet has solutions and has a way to stop the destruction?

Mark: That’s correct. 

Interviewer: Great. And you’re based right here in Lewis?

Mark: We are; we’re based in Louis. Our headquarters is right on Coastal Highway. You can give us a call at (302) 703-9717. Or you can just go to ThinkSecureNet.com. You can go under “Industries” or “Capabilities” on our website, and it’ll navigate you directly to where you need it. 

Interviewer: Fantastic. I look forward to seeing you next Thursday. Thank you very much.