Top 9 Mistakes People Make When They Interview Telephony Vendors [VIDEO]

Finding the perfect telephony vendor for your company, much like partnering with any other type of business, is not easy!

And when it comes to interviewing telephony vendors, you need to know “enough to be dangerous” about the telephony industry, processes, and technology. Otherwise, how will you know if they can be a quality partner?

With that in mind, we interviewed our Chief Technology Officer, Ken Unruh, and asked him to list the top mistakes that people make when interviewing telephony vendors. Take a look:

1. Not thinking about how the vendor fits into business objectives.

When searching for a telephony vendor, we should start by looking internally. We should ask ourselves the following questions:

• What are our ultimate goals?
• What do we plan to get out of this partnership?
• How can this vendor help us accomplish our goals?
• What KPIs do we want to look at? (Do we know which KPIs to look at?)

There are many more questions we could ask, but from a 30,000-foot-view, it’s important to know the general direction we want our business to head and how the telephony vendor can help before we interview anyone.

2. Not understanding the technological requirements of a telephony vendor.

When telephony vendors join the team, they may have updated technology. So, we should know if taking on a new telephony partner means that we need to upgrade the hardware and software we have now.

It is helpful to familiarize ourself with the desktop and network requirements the telephony vendor will need prior to introducing new call center technology to the mix.

3. Not reviewing vendor uptime and how they provide redundancy.

If there is an outage, how can the telephony vendor ensure that our business can keep running? Do they have redundant servers and an action plan in case something goes wrong?

4. Failing to look at data security requirements.

Will the telephony vendor be handling HIPAA data or cardholder data? Information like that has strict security regulations and should be handled with the utmost care. It's extremely important that they have the right security certifications to protect you and your customers.

5. Not considering the scalability of the vendor’s platform.

As our business continues to grow, does the telephony vendor have the capabilities to grow alongside us? Their technology, support, and size need to be able to flex as our staffing requirements grow and change.

6. Not reviewing reporting capabilities.

One of (if not the) most important features of a telephony vendor is their capability to provide and explain reports. Here are some questions to ask when interviewing telephony vendors:

• Are you able to report on the KPIs that are important to our business?
• Will you dig deeper than our expertise in our business and show us unique patterns or interesting data that you have found?
• Will you translate their findings to us and help interpret the data for actionable business decisions?
• Do you have staffing to allow for questions we have on your reporting?
• Will we have constant access to your reporting data?

7. Forgetting to consider organization and culture match.

Simply put, will the potential telephony vendor fit in well with our people? Do they have similar goals, culture, training, and perspective? Getting along well with a telephony vendor makes the relationship a lot easier!

8. Not digging into the pricing structure.

It’s not uncommon for telephony vendors to build in hidden costs (like network access and integration costs) to their services. We have to make sure that we’ve reviewed how they price all their services before signing any contracts. That way, there are no negative surprises down the road.

9. Failing to review the implementation and support resources.

Does the telephony vendor have the infrastructure to start off the relationship quickly and efficiently? Getting the relationship to start on the right foot will be a great help in the long run.

When researching telephony vendors, make sure that you consider all 9 of these tips, and continue to find more tips about technology and contact center management from our blog!

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1.)

Cloud IT Services GmbH Dialfire Dialfire offers you a complete call center solution that is simple and intuitive to use and adapts to your needs. It's completely cloud-based, saving you the hassle of setting up a phone system and installing software. In addition to predictive dialing and call blending of inbound calls, you can create personalized campaigns through an intuitive and easy-to-use interface. Features include automated workflows and full control over the agent screen. You can see the full list of features here:

2.)

Cloudonix Cloudonix’s smart voice calls enable frictionless experiences that drive better customer care and faster sales by merging voice and data into a complete service context. Cloudonix add Cloud capabilities to your existing on premise Call Center enabling your agents to work from anywhere in the world. Security, Privacy and more – rapidly deployed and cost effective without replacing your existing systems or retraining your team.

3.)	Connectica Solutions, LLC PBX On The Cloud We provide complete Cloud-based PBX/Phone Systems, including predictive and progressive dialers, phone lines in more than 75 countries and low cost international rates. We specialize in the US and Latin American market.

4.)	DiRAD Technologies AI Powered Contact Center Provider, AI Chat & Voicebot, Enterprise Telephony Take advantage of the latest customer service innovations with Contact Center, Virtual Assistant, and Interactive Voice solutions for accessible, 24×7 services across multiple channels.

5.)	Layer One Technologies Layer One Technologies provides information and communication technology (ICT) services to businesses in the greater Charlotte area. Whatever your cabling needs, we have you covered.

6.)	Lexico Telecom SIP TRUNK PROVIDER We provide competitive SIP trunk services with different level of quality, IVR mailing service, pay per call servise, DID numbers service.

7.)

Megacall VOIP services Stay in contact quickly and easily with your international offices through Megacall. Megacall will fulfill all your telecommunication requirements and on top of that go the extra mile and surprise you with new possibilities for your business, speed to action your requests and keeping within your budget. 📞 Virtual Switchboard 🔌 SIP trunk 🔢 Virtual number 📠 Call Center Solutions

8.)

NetSapiens SNAPsolution Our SNAPsolution – UC and Collaboration tools – can be quickly deployed so you can realize your ROI just as quick. netsapiens offers a comprehensive suite of unified communications (UC) & Contact Center (CC) feature-sets to service providers. Custom-built to provide our partners with unprecedented levels of flexibility, customization, and ease of use. netsapiens allows you to control your margins in order to improve your ROI. As a provider of a facilities-based solution, you are able to personally choose your origination, termination, hardware costs, etc. to fit your budget. We also allow you to strategically price your product for a maximum return on your investment by charging on a conc... (read more)Our SNAPsolution – UC and Collaboration tools – can be quickly deployed so you can realize your ROI just as quick. netsapiens offers a comprehensive suite of unified communications (UC) & Contact Center (CC) feature-sets to service providers. Custom-built to provide our partners with unprecedented levels of flexibility, customization, and ease of use. netsapiens allows you to control your margins in order to improve your ROI. As a provider of a facilities-based solution, you are able to personally choose your origination, termination, hardware costs, etc. to fit your budget. We also allow you to strategically price your product for a maximum return on your investment by charging on a concurrent call basis instead of charging per-seat or per-feature. SNAPsolution, SNAPvantage, and SNAPanalytics give you all the tools to start off strong in the VoIP industry while giving you room to grow efficiently within your means. Why Sessions, Not Seats? The era of the mobile workforce is upon us. In fact, Google recently put out an estimate that 80% of the global workforce is now performing deskless work every day! Unfortunately, when it comes to providing Unified Communications (UC) features to these deskless employees, many systems operators, carriers and service providers are stuck investing in their platforms on a per-seat basis. That limits them to chasing only about 20% of the workforce - those with actual seats and desks. Why not expand your addressable market and open your business model to chase up to 5 times as many clients as you are today? If a majority of the workforce today doesn’t have a desk, does it make sense to purchase the UC solutions you want to sell by the seat? We don’t think so. That’s why we’ve created this report titled Sessions, Not Seats. In it, we’ll show you why finding a UC platform, like our SNAPsolution, that charges for sessions instead of seats is the way to go.

9.)

Nuxiba Technologies CenterWare Build a strong business presence and improve customer relationships! Offer custom-tailored solutions throughout your sales cycles and customer interactions and assess service levels and control corporate goal achievement through reports and statistics. Obtain detailed reports based on relevant activity in your contact center, access our quality module to assess calls and performance, apply surveys, develop scripts, record conversations, and more! Schedule a live demo or request a quote today!

10.)

PRILINK Demarc Network Traffic Monitor A lightweight Network Traffic Monitor that privides real-time traffic alerts and tracks all IP and SIP endpoints at Demarc. It analyzes mirrored SIP Trunk and Internet traffic in real-time and compiles Network Traffic Analytics (NTA) for all endpoints giving daily network traffic telemetry, most active endpoint summary, endpoint search table and more.

11.)

Scopserv Integrated Services ScopTEL IP PBX The ScopTel IP PBX solution is a distributed software application that can be installed on both virtual and physical servers, thus offering a multitude of architectural designs from premise-based servers to a centralized data center (DC) hosted WAN environment. The application is distributed as an ISO which includes the customized Linux operating system

12.)

Televergence Long Distance and Toll Free Specialists for Contact Centers Televergence is a facilities based US Nationwide High volume/High Capacity Inbound and Outbound VoIP Carrier for Contact Centers. We specialize in termination (outbound) and origination (toll free and local DID) for the contact center. We have a technical staff that is up to date on the majority of platforms in use today, including asterisk and Vicci dial, as well as many of the currently in use software platforms. Contact Centers generally see cost reduction and containment when using Televergence as their contact center telecom carrier. Televergence is the only active US VoIP carrier certified by the Women's Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC), which enables our services to qualify for meeting corporations Supplier Diversity Needs.

13.)

The Phone Number Testing Company Phone Number Testing and Validation Bulk testing and validation of UK Landline and mobile numbers, with a growing list of other coutries where we can test. If you own a large customer or business prospect sales database, our service helps you to quickly and accurately cleanse all the dead records, by identifying all the dead phone numbers. We offer a free no obligation test trial

 

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