We use skype as a preferred phone/IM to talk to our prospective or existing clients. Also, we use skypeout to call client’s phone, if required.
Skype offers Business control panel which is good for small businesses.But, the problem with skype is that chat history is stored on a local machine. So, if you want to access it from some other machine/device you wont be able to check the chat or call details. Also, if your machine is stolen or is broken for some reason, you won’t be able to use your chat details.
Now, these chat/call details are precious for many reasons:
1. If you are talking in the initial stage , these calls become the basis of your project and very important for your pre-sales team. Also, you may want to integrate these initial chats with your CRM.
2. If you are discussing something complex during the project, then recording of these calls become the important artifact for your developers to understand the requirements, doubt clearance etc.
3. Trust me, you dont know when you, or somebody in your team needs to access these chat and call history quickly.
We use gmail Google apps for organizations in vinsol. I would highly recommend http://www.g-recorder.com/ G-recorder. This tool automatically archives my skype calls and skype chats to my gmail mailbox. And it does that so well that I can just search/access/play my previous skype chats or calls. You dont have to do anything. It just works flawlessly in background. and organizes the skype archive in gmail as labels in nicely formatted way. And all the calls are playable in the mail itself without downloading. I think its between $15 to $20 depending on which country you are buying from.
There is another tool http://www.im-history.com/ but i haven’t used it yet.
If you use skype for software development business, then make sure you archive your communication.
Also, before that, please take the permission of the client that you will archive the chat or call for internal reference in case your client is not aware of this.
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We use Skype a lot as well, for chats and voice, aloong with SkypeOut. So this is very relevant and useful info. Thanks!Off late though I’ve seen Skype automatically update the history of my chats when I chat with the same person on a different machine.
Kapil – a small correction. We don’t use gmail at vinsol – we use google apps. And I think that’s what you meant to say.
@vaidyanathan – you may be right but I still have to confirm this as few chats are arhived in history and some are not.@mjuneja – yes, thanks, corrected the bug