Knowing the costs of setting up an enterprise instant messenger are obvious.  You can simply request a price quote, and soon hard data will be on your spreadsheets.

Cost however, is not always the same as value.  How do you measure the value of an instant messenger?

* In terms of the agility that it can offer you within an ever changing marketplace is a big issue for most companies.
* In terms of the cost that it can save you, both in office space and other programs.
* In terms of the customer service responsiveness it allows you to provide because without customers you are out of business.

Just remember that before any decisions are made value should be determined not just cost.

An enterprise instant messenger has a lot of benefits to the organizations that use them.  These benefits add to the value of the tool.  Today we are going to take a look at how an enterprise instant messenger can add value to your customer service process every step of the way.

Filing the complaint

If your complaint systems working on IM there will be no annoying forms for customers to fill out, or reference numbers to keep.

Waiting for a response

When your customer sends an email or fills out a form they may have to wait up to 72 hours for a response.  72 hours in which they are getting irate and telling people about your poor service.  Not exactly the image that you want to project.  An enterprise instant messenger can give your customers immediate feedback.

Getting the support

A customer can get an answer, or a fix in real time which gives you a positive image and helps users to help each other.

Food for thought.

This past week I was on the phone with a customer when another customer beeped in. I couldn’t very well switch over even though the other customer was a larger account. Luckily the large client is a kind and generous person but anyone in business knows well and good that it isn’t always the case.

Brosix came to mind after I got off the phone because I realized yet another advantage for using Enterprise Messaging: the ability to multi-task.

I don’t know about you all but I receive dozens of calls per day both via Skype, Blackberry, and my office phone. Often times I will be on the phone with one person and another will call in. On occasion the call coming in might be more important than the one that I would be on at that moment – although all customers are important, if we were to be honest with one another some are more important than others. It would be nice, extremely nice to be able to talk to all of the clients at once – if possible – and deal with their requests and concerns at the same time.

Brosix allows that option which is one of the reasons why it is the Best IM Client for businesses in my mind. You can set up the network and add your valuable clients so that you can field many requests at once. That should prove to be a tremendous asset for your business.

Did you know that Brosix is based in Bulgaria? Yes, it is! This would come as a surprise to many Brosix customers, as they receive streamlined customer service and care from the Brosix team. Even though Bulgaria is far away from America or many other Western countries, this doesn’t mean that the quality of product or service has decreased at all. 

Brosix is committed to providing the highest level of service possible, whether the customer is in Cape Town, South Africa, or New York City in America. They provide continuous product and technical support throughout your relaltionship with them while using the Brosix enterprise instant messaging client. This is the beauty of having an internet-based company behind the product you are using. They are designed to be international, therefore providing you the freedom to not only work whereever you want, but to expect high quality service and professionalism. 

The developers working at Brosix know that whereever your business or organization is based, you need a secure, reliable, and flexible workplace solution to combat unwelcome files, viruses, or other hidden transfers that can infect your computers or network systems when using other unsecure public instant messaging programs.

The Bottom Line: Even though Brosix is based in Bulgaria, their customer service is based whereever you are.

Ultimately the decision as to whether Brosix is the best enterprise messaging service for your business is a personal one. We believe that Brosix is the best service, naturally, because we built it and we work for the company. We also believe it is the best enterprise messaging service for your business or we wouldn’t be selling it. Yet the question remains: is Brosix the best IM client for you?

Here are some questions worth asking:

1. Do you have workers who telecommute? Would it be a cost saving measure if you introduced that to your company?
2. Do you have workers with children, parents, spouses who they might need to stay at home to take care of – on occasion – who would benefit from having Brosix on their home computers?
3. Is your enterprise email server getting clogged up with quick emails that could be sent as instant messages?
4. Does enterprise instant messaging represent an investment that your clients would appreciate?
5. Can enterprise instant messaging improve your customer service?
6. Do you currently have employees using unsecured instant messaging programs that could endanger your company and your documents?
7. Do you want to control your messaging network to promote productivity, reliability, and security?
8. Would the ease of us running your server for you be a nice plus?

I can think of many more questions that will help you answer the question of whether Brosix is the best enterprise instant messaging client for you, but these are a good starting point. If the answers to any of them are yes then I hope you will consider using Brosix!

Brosix offers a unique Instant Messaging service to companies and organizations that seek for secure and controlled communication over the Internet.

Just go to Brosix.com web site and create your Instant Messenger in a minute. Your Instant Messenger needs servers to operate on the Internet. To make things easier for you, we host your Instant Messaging Network on our optimized servers so you don’t need to worry about server maintenance and configuration.

Upon the registration you get a special build for you of Brosix application and a web control panel.

You give the application to all of your employees, colleagues, customers, partners and whoever you want to communicate with. They install it on their computers and will be able to connect and use Brosix from different places all around the world – your offices (you may have more than one office), people’s homes, airports etc.

If you have Brosix on your laptop, you will be able to use it in the office, will be able to use it when you are at home, will be able to use it when you are in another state or country. All this is possible without configuring your office infrastructure. You don’t need to install and configure anything on your servers as we already deployed all necessary components on our optimized servers. The only thing you need in order to use Brosix is to have an Internet connection on your computers.

This provides great flexibility in the ways Brosix is used and at the same time it keeps all the communication safe as all communication channels are properly encrypted.

The ways you can use Brosix to communicate are:

• Text chat with rich text formatting
• Text conferences
• Voice chat
• Video chat
• File Transfer
• Screen-shot
• Co-Browse
• Whiteboard
• Voice Conference
• Voice Mail
• Screen Sharing

More about each of these can be found at Brosix features.

Now, a few words about the web control panel. It gives you a full control over your Instant Messaging Network.

• Add/remove users. You can disable new user registrations and this way control who is allowed to use your Brosix.
   
• Modify user contact lists and control who can communicate with who.
   
• Enable/disable features of Brosix application for each user. For example, you may allow some users to use File Transfer and disallow them use Video. You can allow others use Video and disallow Voice.

Optimizing communication in your organization is just few clicks away – go to Brosix.com web site, create your Instant Messaging Network in a minute and start using it right away with all rich features and secured communication channels.

Instant messaging is the fastest developing communication tool, and businesses solve issues to make it work in the corporate environment.

When it comes to discussing free public Internet applications, there is no doubt that instant messaging (IM) has been one of the biggest phenomena that have gained widespread popularity and are greatly enjoyed by users. In 2005, 80% of Internet users made use of IM, and the figures keep rising.

According to a recent survey of IM trends in the USA, conducted by AOL, 30% of people prefer instant messaging to phone calls, and 40% make bigger use of it than they do of e-mails.

The popularity of IM solutions is not limited to USA alone. While the technology is very popular in Northern America and Europe, recent reports suggest that IM usage has also been rapidly growing in developing economies like China. The number of registered IM users in the country reached 900 million in the beginning of 2007.

Business has not remained unaffected by the new trend. Almost half of all big international companies are using some form of instant messaging for their daily communication, and it has to be admitted that IM is now a serious corporate IT issue. The reason is clear – instant messaging is faster than e-mail; you can check whether the other person is online and thus avoid a time-wasting e-mail or phone lag. IM can also reduce meeting costs within a company by connecting geographically separate employees by low-cost instant interaction. Employees can use it to exchange information or work together, without the need of organizing or holding meetings.

The only problem that occurs in the use of IM at the workplace is security. When using a free public IM such as ICQ or MSN, companies cannot be protected of unauthorized use, hacker or virus threats. However, a solution has also been found to this problem – specialized corporate instant messengers have been created to better meet the security needs of small businesses and large corporations alike.

One of the best developed enterprise IM is the special solution offered by Brosix. Brosix was founded in 2006 to develop simple, easy-to-use, secure communication tools for home and enterprises. The aim of the company is to provide to organizations innovative secure instant messaging and other Internet technologies without making substantial investments in hardware, software and infrastructure.

So, how does the Brosix instant messenger solve firms’ security issues? It allows clients to create their own business instant messaging networks and organize a complete user selection, which can be managed through an online control panel.

Customers get their own private network hosted on the Brosix servers, and can easily manage it via a web-based Administration Console and have full control on users, contact lists, block users, etc. By having a private network, customers can be sure that only authorized users within that network request their messages, file transfers and chat sessions. Last, but not least, Brosix encrypts all the traffic with a 256-bit key. Instant messages, file transfers, voice/video/text chats, etc. are encrypted and only the recipient users can decrypt and use/see them.

It is therefore clear that business can find and does actually find ways to make place for IM in the highly sensitive business environment. IM has gone corporate, and aims to stay so. 

From multi-user operating systems, through teenage use and into the corporate business environment, instant messengers are here to stay.

We often consider instant messengers to be a very recent invention, mainly because of their widespread popularity over the last few years.

In fact, the beginnings of instant messaging (IM) date as far back as the 1960s, when it was used in multi-user operating systems. Instant messengers are therefore older than the Internet itself.

It wasn’t until the 1990s that the technology saw its first great boom. It was mostly young people who used it, but the advantages of the tool were already clearly visible: it was extremely efficient, very cheap as compared to other communication forms, and surprisingly easy to use.

This is the reason why more and more people became fans of instant messaging, and why it is now a preferred communication tool for young and old alike. Recently, IM has been widely used by businesses looking to make communication faster and cost-efficient, especially by companies with big multinational operations that would otherwise require great communication expenses.

However, in order to deal with virus threat, unauthorized use, and security issues, special corporate instant messengers are being developed to cater for the needs of various businesses and organizations.

One of the latest developments in this area is the Brosix Enterprise Instant Messenger. It is a powerful, easy-to-use tool, and an excellent solution for enterprises and individuals that need to improve communications, business productivity, and relationships with partners and customers.

Several main factors make Brosix the preferred choice of both large corporations and small-sized businesses.

First, Brosix ensures complete confidentiality, security, and virus protection. While information exchanged over a public instant messenger can leak to practically anyone, Brosix customers create their own private network, hosted on Brosix servers, and all traffic is encrypted with 256 but keys which only the intended recipient users can decrypt.

Moreover, the solution provides an all-in-one package in order to help customers organize better their business, clients support, and office interaction. Brosix supports not only text messages, but also Whiteboard, Co-Browse, Voice/Video Chat, etc.

Last, but not least, the tool has inexpensive flat-free pricing. The subscription fee for a customer’s network depends on the number of users registered in it. The network capacity is increased in blocks of 10, and can be easily expanded at any time.

SMEs strive to survive the global credit crunch.

It has now been officially acknowledged – the world is facing a serious economic setback; inflation is rising and the future seems unclear. Companies try to react and cut costs accordingly in order to be able to survive the harsh reality. But what can you do if you are not the size of GM and cannot afford to cut 10% of a 40,000-strong workforce? Small and medium-sized businesses seem very limited in terms of the savings that they are able to make.

Not necessarily, a new survey shows. It studied over 200 SMEs around the world, 73% of which stated that they have at least partially managed to cut costs in response to the global financial crisis. Here are some of the conclusions from this survey:

• Increased fuel and commodity costs have affected 80% of the small and medium-sized enterprises and has forced them to change their business practices.
• 73% of the firms have taken countermeasures, such as reducing office premises and introducing flexi hours, hot-desking, and home working.
• As a result, more people prefer to work from home and thus save transport costs.

While home working (also known as ‘telecommuting’) has often been referred to as the future of business, the present economic situation has accelerated the process and a growing number of professionals prefer to stay at home and work from there.

A recent development that has helped this process is the widespread popularity of the so-called ‘enterprise instant messaging’. While phone and e-mail are still preferred means of business communication, instant messengers especially designed to meet the needs of businesses with many telecommuters or remote partners and clients are gaining widespread popularity, as they prove to be faster, cheaper, and more efficient that both phone and e-mail.

Brosix Enterprise Instant Messenger is one of the most popular such solutions that were recently introduced and that a growing number of SMEs are now using. Brosix is a powerful and easy-to-use instant messenger which allows clients to create their own business instant messaging networks and organize a complete user selection which can be managed through an online control panel.

By using a corporate IM such as Brosix, firms can ensure the authenticity of network users and rely on highly secure communication for strict and confidential business purposes – which is indeed the main difference between a business IM and a free public messenger such as ICQ or MSN. Thus, SMEs get an optimized work process with additional features.