I pride myself on being always up front and honest and truly look out for what's best for my clients. Unfortunately, that comes with losing deals to unscrupulous salespeople and naive prospects and their bad decision making. And if I'm being really honest, it seems the majority of old school telecom companies are worse than used car salespeople. They will say anything to get a deal signed.
We do consult on a lot of Unified Communications phone systems as really they are cloud software at the end of the day. So I've decided to start a Hall of Shame to highlight what not to do when shopping for technology as I think it's valuable. So here are some things to look out for. If you hear these things, best find someone else.
We're local. If you don't have someone local you will be in trouble if you need help. This is a classic used by old school telecom installers. The thing is, and they are well aware, there isn't anything "local" in a cloud based phone system. Your phone calls are terminated in a data center usually in another state then your calls are redirected to the phone over the internet. There is no phone system on site for them to "come work on" and as far as the phones, they are provisioned remotely at the data center site. Things like transferring extensions or changing voicemail settings are all done online, whether you do it yourself or the company customer service does.
Taxes and fees are all the same so we don't quote them This one is a very big deal as taxes and fees can vary from company to company and state to state and they know this. Additonally, in VOIP, they can be 30% or more of your overall spend so it's a big deal. If you hear this, their taxes and fees are high and don't want to have to show you. We have one VOIP company we recommend quite a bit as they are structured in a way that waives most taxes and competitors are always trying to side-step this.
If you don't use our phones, they won't integrate with our software This one is unique to a few industry specific software applications that have recently gotten into VOIP. Don't buy it. Logically, does it make sense that they would limit their software to only work with their phones? I recently came across this with a car dealership. Their service software sales rep said that certain features only work with their phones (Because they were already using the software, he didn't risk losing a software sale) Does it really make sense that they would limit their best software features to organizations that adopt their phones? No, those features are available with a wide variety of VOIP services obviously. But the client was a sucker and spent 20 thousand dollars up front and $1000/mo more than they had to.
You have to buy our phones or we won't support them This is something you typically hear from companies that don't have a good rental or free phone program. Don't buy it. The warrantees on phones are only 1 to 2 years however if you lease or rent, they are good for as long as you have the service. If they tell you something like, if you ever switch, you can use these phones, that's also BS. Sure you can use your existing phones, but they will need to be reprogrammed on site which will cost you more than just getting new phones from a new phone company. That's much easier.
As always, if you want to ensure you aren't being taken advantage of, use our consulting and brokerage. We know their BS and since we are paid by the carriers no matter who you go with, we have no ulterior motives to manipulate you into something that isn't right for you.
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