As the trusted voice partner of many MSPs, we regularly hear all the horror stories about a former vendor, partner, or third-party supplier who promised the world only to fail miserably when it came time to deliver.
Here are a few of the more common thigs we’ve heard from our MSPs when we first talked with them:
- They told us the voice quality moving from a traditional system to a hosted system would be just as good.
- They said it wouldn’t be a problem moving the customer’s existing phone numbers.
- They don’t answer support calls, or when they do, the issues don’t get resolved for days, weeks, or ever, and my client is screaming at me.
- They said they would handle support, but my support team is doing 90% of it and we’re getting killed.
- We had such a bad experience we will never offer VoIP to our customers again.
It happens more often than not, and the one thing each of the complaints above share in common is it’s costing the MSP money. It’s costing them in unbillable service time, and in some cases, it’s costing them the entire account. In additional to the financial losses, their credibility, trust, and reputation with those clients is damaged.
Unfortunately, no MSP can know ahead of time what’s going to happen with a new vendor. Sure, they can conduct due diligence and check ratings and referrals, but without actually going through the voice install and support process from start to finish, they’ll never truly know what their client’s experience is going to be like when the time to implement that new voice solution.
What the Right VoIP Partner Should do For MSPs
We learned long ago that even the best talk still isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. Until our MSP partners experienced what we promised firsthand, they’d never trust us with one of their clients. So rather than offer deep discounts, incentives, and a bunch of promises, we chose to walk the walk.
Our core focus as a company is to “Honor our Relationships.” To us it means putting the relationship with our clients and partners ahead of the dollars they represent. It meant insisting that new MSP partners USE our service prior to ever presenting a contract to one of their clients. We wanted our partner to go through the experience from start to finish. We wanted them to use the service, test the service, and have unlimited access to our support resources throughout. When complete, it was up to them as to whether or not they wanted to offer our services to their clients.
We believe anything short of proving out the service is just a lot of talk and hot air. If your VoIP partner or potential VoIP partner isn’t willing to walk the walk with you, there’s probably a reason.
We are a Cleveland-based Internet telephony service provider. As such, we can offer both voice and data services and are directly connected with several major carriers. We’re able to deliver high-speed data connections like Metro Ethernet and T1 service at a very competitive rates as well as SIP and Hosted PBX services to our MSP partners.
