January 06
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Is the hassle of switching voice and communications providers making you hesitate on upgrading or finding a provider that better suits your needs? Do you worry about compatibility with your information technology?
IT Voice will guide you to the right service level and providers the same way we do for all your technology needs. After all, we know your business and your IT challenges. Pairing voice and technology together makes sense. Some things are just better together like… peanut butter and jelly.
Assess Pain Points
You’re likely well aware of your phone system and telecom carrier pain points. However, dealing with hiccups day-to-day or even intermittent issues can blind you to the real costs of outdated phone systems or underperforming carriers. Calculate the loss of dropped calls not only in terms of lost productivity but lost sales and lost customers.
Assess the limitations of your current phone system. Evaluate whether your phone system is helping you achieve your business goals. Ask yourself: “Does our phone system help us serve our customers better? Are we getting the best service at the lowest cost? Will our phone system grow as our business expands?”
Considerations for Choosing a Telecom Carrier
When choosing a telephone/internet provider, here are the things we consider, and you should too:
- Customer service reputation
- Bandwidth needs, including hybrid work environments, cloud computing, and video conferencing
- Type of service
- Availability in your area
- Implementation support
- Compatibility with and impact on other technologies in your business
- Contract dates
- Termination fees
In addition to geographic coverage, telecom carriers have different strengths that may factor into your selection.
Working with Carriers
Comparing providers can be tough if you’re unfamiliar with the carriers, their service levels, and their contract language. That’s why many managed services partners prefer to work with you after that leg work is done.
At IT Voice, we refer to that process as the last mile, and we believe that last mile is just as important as the first step. We work with carriers every day and understand their offerings and actual service levels—not just their ideal service as advertised. We can apply all that experience to your projects to take the hassle out of switching carriers, renewing contracts, or upgrading. You don’t have to go it alone when it comes to working with your telephone carriers.
Benefits of Combining IT + Voice Solutions
Combining all of your IT and voice solutions under IT Voice as your trusted partner has valuable benefits, from accountability and expertise to time savings and efficiency.
Yes, upgrading systems involves extra work, but it’s certainly not as disruptive as communications breakdowns; whether it’s from equipment failure or what we’ve seen over 2020-21. Our blog post on the importance of tech agility summed up a great lesson learned over the past 18 months, and it’s worth repeating:
With employees working from home, it was a challenge for many businesses to manage their phone numbers--especially for client facing employees. Businesses with VoIP phone systems could make this transition easily, whereas those still relying on the traditional phone setup had to resort to cell phones and couldn’t use their business numbers for a while.
Indeed, our digital world requires agility. However, when systems don’t work as expected, you don’t have to guess whether it’s an IT or communications issue. Just call us.
You have one vendor relationship and one invoice for all IT Voice services.
You don’t have to research telecom providers and search for vendors when it’s time to upgrade or make a change. We’re here for you.
Best of all, you can focus on growing your business and people and leave the technology—both networking and voice—to us.
For more tips on selecting a telecom provider, grab our guide below.
