Discord and Telephone calls

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eric76
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10:02a, 1/20/25
AG
We have one guy who wants to dump our telephone system and go with discord for all phone calls?

Is that actually viable?

I don't know enough about discord to intelligently make any kind of decision about it.

From what I understand and from web searches, they have voice calls over discord, but both caller and called must both be discord users and calling from discord apps or from desktops connected to the discord site. Is that true?

If it is true, then it is clearly a no go.
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SF2004
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11:27a, 1/20/25
AG
This is a hard no.

As much as teams, discord, skype, whatever has grown your company still needs a tried and true telephone system.

edit: you are correct, in order to call on discord you need to both be on discord.

Discord is a gaming/community app, not a business one.
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eric76
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In reply to SF2004 • 12:54p, 1/20/25
AG
SF2004 said:
This is a hard no.

As much as teams, discord, skype, whatever has grown your company still needs a tried and true telephone system.

edit: you are correct, in order to call on discord you need to both be on discord.

Discord is a gaming/community app, not a business one.
Thanks. That is pretty much what is expected.
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eric76
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In reply to SF2004 • 12:59p, 1/20/25
AG
I suppose that what I ought to do is pull out my cell phone and offer to call his discord number. That does not include installing anything on my cell phone -- I try to keep the installed apps to be pretty limited.
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SF2004
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In reply to eric76 • 1:04p, 1/20/25
AG
eric76 said:
I suppose that what I ought to do is pull out my cell phone and offer to call his discord number. That does not include installing anything on my cell phone -- I try to keep the installed apps to be pretty limited.
Please do and report back.

I love tech and Microsoft teams has done amazing things for our company BUT, when a customer needs to get a hold of me (or the company) they use my phone number.
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Caesar4
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2:56p, 1/20/25
AG
Just curious, why does that one person want to switch to Discord, or switch at all? There are indeed other options, like Ooma Office (among others)

https://www.ooma.com/small-business-phone-systems/

https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-business-voip-providers
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IrishAg
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In reply to eric76 • 4:14p, 1/20/25
eric76 said:
We have one guy who wants to dump our telephone system and go with discord for all phone calls?

Is that actually viable?

I don't know enough about discord to intelligently make any kind of decision about it.

From what I understand and from web searches, they have voice calls over discord, but both caller and called must both be discord users and calling from discord apps or from desktops connected to the discord site. Is that true?

If it is true, then it is clearly a no go.
How big is your company and what kind of telephone service? I could see going over to a corporate softphone scenario built into messaging with external numbers (my company uses Webex teams for messaging, internal calls, and external calls). That type of solution give you a lot of flexibility on how people use the service via hardware.

With all that said, I'm pretty sure Discord doesn't have a business based setup that has an external bridge. You would want something that is designed to have business based resiliences and could bridge to real numbers.
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eric76
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In reply to Caesar4 • 12:05a, 1/21/25
AG
Caesar4 said:
Just curious, why does that one person want to switch to Discord, or switch at all? There are indeed other options, like Ooma Office (among others)

https://www.ooma.com/small-business-phone-systems/

https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-business-voip-providers
He's very intelligent, but I think that he often sees things the way he wants to see them instead of what they actually are.
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eric76
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In reply to IrishAg • 12:08a, 1/21/25
AG
IrishAg said:
eric76 said:
We have one guy who wants to dump our telephone system and go with discord for all phone calls?

Is that actually viable?

I don't know enough about discord to intelligently make any kind of decision about it.

From what I understand and from web searches, they have voice calls over discord, but both caller and called must both be discord users and calling from discord apps or from desktops connected to the discord site. Is that true?

If it is true, then it is clearly a no go.
How big is your company and what kind of telephone service? I could see going over to a corporate softphone scenario built into messaging with external numbers (my company uses Webex teams for messaging, internal calls, and external calls). That type of solution give you a lot of flexibility on how people use the service via hardware.

With all that said, I'm pretty sure Discord doesn't have a business based setup that has an external bridge. You would want something that is designed to have business based resiliences and could bridge to real numbers.
It's a small, family business. We currently have only one employee that is not related to the rest of us.
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Proposition Joe
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8:12a, 1/21/25
And how often are phones used? Just internally, or do customers call in?
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Yellerjacket
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In reply to eric76 • 10:37a, 1/21/25
We are right around 50 employees and we have decided that cell phones and Teams calling is all we need. A "phone system" would be overkill.
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lb3
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In reply to Yellerjacket • 3:31p, 1/21/25
AG
We switched most of our VOIP lines to Jabber soft phones over a year ago. I've received one phone call in that time and it was a robo-call for some warranty service.
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eric76
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In reply to Proposition Joe • 4:42p, 1/21/25
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Proposition Joe said:
And how often are phones used? Just internally, or do customers call in?
Mainly customers, both local and national, calling in and us returning their calls.
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eric76
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In reply to Yellerjacket • 4:43p, 1/21/25
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Yellerjacket said:
We are right around 50 employees and we have decided that cell phones and Teams calling is all we need. A "phone system" would be overkill.
How easy is it to forward calls on cell phones?
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FreeLunch
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7:45p, 1/21/25
AG
You can get Zoom Phone or Ring Central at an affordable rate. You can port your phone numbers to these phone systems and they will work. They have the ability to do call trees, etc for the main phone line.

You can also look at Google Voice consumer for something free. Google voice business is paid and cheaper than Zoom Phone or Ring Central, but if you need to get the calls, I wouldn't depend upon Google voice business to give you much support.

Everything mentioned above can be used with your cell phone, computer, or even a phone that you can get that sits on your desk.
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Lathspell
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9:36p, 1/21/25
AG
There's only 3 or 4 of you?

Zoom Phone is their phone only product at $15 per month, per extension. If you want video and many of the AI features they offer, the cost is about $22.50 per extension on an annual prepay.

RingCentral would cost you more than that. Their Core seats start at $30, though I can easily discount that. Then you have to add $5 per extension for CRF and e911.

Outside of the monthly costs you then need to either purchase or lease the physical phones if you want physical phones. Then there is installation if you want someone to set everything up for you, handle all the number porting, and provide training.

ETA: Also, never go directly to providers like RingCentral or Zoom. Always go through a local Partner if you can. Pricing is either the exact same or a little lower and you now have an added layer of escalation or support for anything.
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UmustBKidding
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1:11a, 1/22/25
I run incredible pbx in a vps, and sip trunks from bulk vs. Most expensive part is like $1.50 month for e911 per number. Each number cost $0.06 month but costs a quarter to set up.
Have a few dozen numbers for various things unlimited extensions and probably all in less e911 for $30 a year.
Self host and save A buck a month.
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htxag09
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In reply to Yellerjacket • 7:52a, 1/22/25
AG
Yellerjacket said:
We are right around 50 employees and we have decided that cell phones and Teams calling is all we need. A "phone system" would be overkill.
We are at a couple thousand and we recently did the same.

We still have our office numbers, but if someone calls it, it goes straight to Teams.
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Lathspell
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11:14a, 1/22/25
AG
I have a few customers who went to teams. One was an international company with around 800 phones. They decided to only use Teams for internal communication and just get around 80 licenses for calling, for operators and those who need to talk to the outside world. But even for them, I pushed to go through an operator connect solution like Momentum, versus going with the Teams Phone with a dialing plan. Cost is about the same, but support, reliability, and redundancy is far superior. Hell, Microsoft would prefer you go with an operator connect partner as opposed to using them for the calling plan.

As a phone system, I find Teams to be clunky, a pain to manage, and lacking in several important modern features.

For others who actually need phone system features, its very different. Have a steel company with around 1,800 phones that we are looking to migrate to RingCentral from an IP telephony solution with SIP trunks. However, this company can't go with a shoddy self maintained open source solution with cheap SIP trunks because they cannot suffer any outages or poor call quality. If they are down for a few hours on a weekend, they could lose millions of dollars.

My biggest points of emphasis for a business solution of any kind is reliability, resiliency, redundancy, mobility, and support. If I cannot provide the highest level of each of those to a company, I would never sell it to them.
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eric76
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In reply to Lathspell • 7:55p, 1/22/25
AG
Lathspell said:
There's only 3 or 4 of you?

Zoom Phone is their phone only product at $15 per month, per extension. If you want video and many of the AI features they offer, the cost is about $22.50 per extension on an annual prepay.

RingCentral would cost you more than that. Their Core seats start at $30, though I can easily discount that. Then you have to add $5 per extension for CRF and e911.

Outside of the monthly costs you then need to either purchase or lease the physical phones if you want physical phones. Then there is installation if you want someone to set everything up for you, handle all the number porting, and provide training.

ETA: Also, never go directly to providers like RingCentral or Zoom. Always go through a local Partner if you can. Pricing is either the exact same or a little lower and you now have an added layer of escalation or support for anything.
There are currently five. Sometimes there are more. It just depends.

We also need to put telephones in various other rooms such as the computer room, the conference room, the front desk, ... .

Preferably, the ability to put them in other buildings as well would likely be appreciated. For example, the shop and the gym.
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UmustBKidding
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In reply to eric76 • 9:06p, 1/22/25
Do you still have you att high bandwidth connection,? Pretty simple strategies using something like incredible pbx with reliable internet connection either self hosted or cloud that have cost in the few dollars a month for everything, all numbers, lines and no limits on extensions.
Everyone talks like $15/mo is a good deal, i think its crazy expensive. Email in my profile if want to discuss directly.
Hope thing are well in gruver these days.

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Lathspell
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In reply to eric76 • 11:39p, 1/22/25
AG
My question to all companies looking at migrating to the cloud is, "Do you really need that phone?"

If you keep your cell phone on you, the leading providers have great mobile apps that allow you to fully utilize all the features of your phone system from your cell phone. That allows you to be mobile without needing a physical handset in all the places you could possibly be.

For some people, that seems too high tech. But if you can make calls on your cell phone, you can use any of the mobile apps from these providers. The user experience is pretty much the same, you just have more options while on a call like Hold, Transfer, Conference, Record, Transcribe, etc.

I haven't used a desk phone in years. I have several for demo purposes, but I work 100% off my cell phone app and PC app, depending on what's easiest for me at the moment.

ETA: Huge benefit for business is the ability to use your business number for SMS/MMS. I can't tell you how often I call a customer and receive a text back saying to call them back in 10 minutes, or tell me they are in a meeting and will call me back later. The ability to text is basically required to do business, these days. Granted, setting up texting has been made into a pain in the ass with needing to register with TCR.
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