The small-to-midsized business (SMB) space has arguably been getting the short end of the stick for awhile now. Much like the Tampa Bay Devil Rays — er, Rays — used to until they defeated their larger American League East compatriots, the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox, for the AL East Division title last year and fell just short in the World Series.

Enough with the baseball analogies, though. The SMB space is vast yet it is not until recently that many different software companies have begun to create solutions that are geared specifically for this burgeoning business segment. For years it had been dumbed down, cheaper versions of enterprise-grade software that likely made many SMBs feel as though they were like hand-me-down clothes from your older siblings. And, unless Tim Gunn is the own handing them down, do you really want them?

Executives at VoIP application provider BroadSoft also believe that is misguided, particularly in the area of telephony. Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) can help SMBs be more competitive with its larger counterparts, says the company’s vice president of marketing, Leslie Ferry. “Quite honestly, small businesses work harder [than their larger counterparts] sometimes,” she declares. “They shouldn’t let their appearance from a telephony standpoint negatively impact what they can deliver from core competency.”

She expands further, saying that in the past six months her company has been on a mission to explain why SMBs would want a VoIP solution — essentially, a set of facilities used to manage the delivery of voice information over the Internet — over more traditional analog solutions for its telephony needs. “We’ve been in the business for 10 years,” she says. “There’s just a lot of institutional, market, and product knowledge we thought we could use to self-educate small businesses to understand our solution.”

Some fast benefits Ferry points out include:

• getting VoIP as a hosted, on-demand solution thereby eliminating upfront capital expenses;
• integration with a Web portal from a CRM desktop so information is there immediately about incoming client calls;
• cheaper costs for handling calls via IP solutions;
• the ability to have a virtual call center and leverage work-at-home agents, eliminating the costs of opening a brick-and-mortar facility;
• call forwarding and call routing;
• the ability to network and use support services anywhere; and
• mobile phone services to help keep SMB workers in touch with colleagues and clients at any time.

Sound like something we would expect for a large company with multiple contact center sites? Absolutely — that’s exactly the point Ferry is trying to get across. SMBs can have this functionality now, so when we call into one of these smaller businesses’ customer service lines we forget if it is a multibillion dollar coporation or a mom-and-pop outlet.

For the SMBs out there, do you feel as though you need VoIP to run the telephony for your contact centers, and to keep up with the changing times? Do you believe that you’re finally getting solutions that speak specifically to the challenges you face every day, as opposed to just a stripped down version of an enterprise-grade offering?

In the conversations I’ve had with analysts about different topics during my time here at CRM magazine, I’ve surmised that in most cases the more mature a software becomes, the more apt it is to be delivered in verticalized solutions, whether its for a particular industry (retail, government) or business segment (SMB).

Is this something that you see as well? As SMBs — is this a good or bad thing? You be the judge.