What your Cloud based VOIP Provider isn’t telling you.
So you are starting to looking for a new cloud-based VoIP service and provider for your business, and bam you get inundated with a ton marketing material, funny buzzwords, and telecom carrier promises for what they can do for you. Slow down ! What you really need to do is approach the selection of a cloud VoIP solutions and provider that same way you would select any other major technology platform you want to get and integrate into your business.
Here are a list of five things your cloud VoIP provider won’t tell you.
1. We’re Part of the Commodity, Not your Solution
Before you begin shopping for business-grade hosted VoIP solutions, we can’t emphasize it enough the importance of doing a little upfront homework and analyze your actual requirements.
As cloud based VoIP grows, so do the “me, too” providers selling it, most likely and some most likely won’t be around for the long haul or even be able to support the changing technical requirements that businesses like your are now seeking. Therefore, you need to eliminate and rule out the commodity type VoIP carriers as early in the selection cycle as you can by using the following tactics:
• Know your business and technology requirements for cloud VoIP in your company.
• Do some Research of cloud VoIP vendors online.
• Seek out customer references for cloud VoIP providers you are considering.
• Know your current office telecom costs and trends for the past 12–18 months.
We can even provide you some information on how to choose a partner, not a cheap vendor. Some great advice to follow when choosing a cloud VoIP vendor.
2. A providers Cloud VoIP Solution may not work with your company’s Firewall
When considering which cloud VoIP solution you choose for your company, it’s very important to drill down and analyze all the potential issues you might encounter between your current network and the proposed cloud VoIP platform. Security needs to be a major deciding factor in your cloud VoIP platform requirements.
3. We pass off voice traffic to the Public Internet as soon as we can
Hosted VoIP providers may have a great call quality and experience during the sales and selling cycles but it can quickly shift if customer calls get pushed off to the public Internet, using a connecting and bandwidth that isn’t adequate enough for high quality service, where call quality can take a dive is bad internet. We can provide some recommendations and test the broadband connection before you make a choice and make the necessary recommendations before you make the move to one of the prospective VoIP providers:
Some things we look at are:
• Business-class access that bases the bandwidth of the circuit on the call quantity, codec used, and bandwidth for data traffic
• A private, secure, multiple-protocol label switching network carrying voice traffic on the VoIP provider’s private network to guarantee bidirectional call quality
• Quality of service (QoS), with dynamic bandwidth allocation to guarantee high-level QoS through prioritizing voice over data traffic
4. Our Disaster Recovery Site is in the Same Geographic Area
Although there are no accepted VoIP provider practices for locating a disaster recovery (DR) site, you want to ask questions about the geographic location of your prospective cloud VoIP provider’s DR sites. A DR site in the same geographic area, on the same power grid, much less relying on the same Internet provider, may not do much good when a natural disaster or other calamity strikes.
5. Our Services Team is Contracted Out to a Third Party
In order to have the most effective implementation of service, as well as any troubleshooting, maintenance, and management of cloud VoIP require a dedicated professional services team, despite advancements in cloud technologies. Overdependence on contractors to support such a mission-critical platform as VoIP telephony can lead to continuity, turnover, and other issues around the availability of appropriately skilled staff to manage customer VoIP platforms.
Dealing with Cloud VoIP Vendors 101
Just like any other business technology change, when shopping for a VoIP platform it requires doing your research upfront, and above all, analyzing and documenting what your business and technical requirements are, so that you can control the proposed vendor conversations without wasting time during the vendor-selection process, or you can let us handle that for you.
At Randercom we have years of experience and expertise in helping companies get what they need, and since we work with over 70 top performing Telecom providers we know where to go to get the right service and can guide you to making the best choice for your companies exact requirements. One call to Randercom does it all !
Give us a call and we’ll do the rest (920) 731-3944
