Have you looked around at current business VoIP providers in an effort to make a decision among them and found yourself confused by their offers? Many of them sound great, appearing to offer just the benefit you need. But if you don’t really understand the offer – are you sure you even need it?
The benefits associated with business VoIP are clear – lower cost of communications, one monthly fee for national long distance, streamline communication channels and integration opportunities for a number of different applications. When examining the different business VoIP providers, however, you have to be able to determine the value offers from the junk if you hope to gain any benefit.
For instance, if you see an offer for business VoIP service from just $19.99 per month. This sounds great, but what the provider is actually offering is Tiered Per user Pricing. What exactly does this mean? The offer is really only good for companies with more than a set number of lines and if you don’t need that many, you’ll actually pay a higher price.
Other providers may fail to provide any detailed pricing on their websites. It doesn’t really make sense to leave this information off the site as the provider has the ability to make changes any time they have rate increases. By clearing providing pricing information, they can avoid confusion among the target market.
It’s not uncommon to run into offers where premium features are not included. Many a business VoIP provider may offer the auto-attendant, but it will cost an additional $19.99 per month. There may also be extra fees for porting numbers. Plus, the feature you wanted in VoIP to begin with may not even be available from all vendors. At this point, it’s important to ask those key questions about what’s included in the offer.
Failure to understand what a feature can do is another common problem. With a lack of standards in the industry, vendors are free to describe things however they see fit. As a result, different terminology is used for the same VoIP feature by different vendors. This is often true for advanced or premium features. Plus, not all provides support smartphone apps the same way and the processes you or your employees have become accustomed to may not be ideal under a new provider.
Finally, it’s important to understand whether or not the provider can support the phones that you already have. If not, you may need a whole new system, which adds to the cost. This is not always a bad thing, just be prepared for the answer when you ask the question.
Most business VoIP providers are not trying to confuse the customer or get them hung up in the process. But, customers have to be educated if they hope to make the right decision for their business.
To make the most informed decision possible, resources like
GetVoIP.com exist that offer customer reviews, provider comparisons and other details relating to adopting residential and business VoIP. The site offers tips on choosing a VoIP provider in addition to industry news and content to help VoIP shoppers make an educated decision on their communications systems.
Edited by Rachel Ramsey