Our first big change in 2017 is scrapping our regular plans (free,seed,grow) for Elastic Pricing, we are positive you will find this much more straigthforward.
Customers told us choosing a ‘plan’ was not flexible enough so we’ve listened and moved to an elastic model. The concept is simple, you want more call handling capacity, you pay more – you need less, you pay less. Everyone gets all the features and extensions are free.
We have also introduced optional free call bundles which makes managing your monthly costs more straightforward.
A good analogy is to imagine your phone system as a hardware unit which needs a telephone cable for each call in or out. Adjusting capacity is like adding or removing cables, but the cables are virtually managed by dragging a slide bar in your browser. Note that call capacity is calls in and out, calls between extensions or the number of extensions you can have are not affected.
Changing your capacity is simple, you just slide ‘channels’ up or down and the price goes up or down. Like this..
I am on now plan x, what changes for my account ?
Nothing (unless you want to), you remain on your existing plan until you decide to switch.
How do I change to elastic pricing ?
There is a new page called ‘supplements’, select that from the main menu. Once you ‘apply changes’ on the call capacity page you will be on ‘elastic pricing’.
£4.99 per extra channel per month, the first channel is free. When you adjust capacity the new price will be displayed.
What exactly is a channel ?
An active call takes up one channel, however channels are measured separately for inbound and outbound calls (nice!). For example if you have capacity set to 2, then you can have 2 active calls in and 2 active calls out at the same time (4 calls). Note that call forwarding would fully use 1 channel as there is an inbound leg and an outbound leg.
How do I know how many channels I need ?
You need to predict what the maximum number of active calls will be at your busiest time, either inbound or outbound. For example if you mainly receive calls and you expect to have 10 incoming calls at the same time then the capacity should be set to 10. Note that calls that are on hold or waiting in a call queue will use up a channel.
Note that if your inbound channels are exceeding you will automatically get congestion graphing in call analytics.
How do I know how many channels I currently have ?
You can see this at the top right of the PBX manager.