Awesome Customer Service is ABSOLUTELY Required
Here at Versature we follow the Hosted Voice industry pretty closely. This week I came across a press release from Parallels for a new Hosted PBX offering for small business. For those of you who don’t know, Parallels has a massive install base with Web Hosting companies, because they provide automation and virtualization software which allows the web hosting companies to monetize their data centres.
I guess Parallels has seen the same SMB trends that we have and has decided that their installed base of web hosting companies is a great way to reach SMB customers. Makes sense right? They are already servicing these companies so why not add Hosted PBX to the mix and provide their voice services as well? As a person who’s been knee-deep in this industry for the past 8 years, I am going to tell you this strategy won’t work, and here’s why.
To be successful in Voice Over IP as a Service Provider, you have to have a first class support organization. There is no way around it. No matter how many precautions you take as a service provider to ensure that the customer’s service is rock solid, there is always the end-user who thinks it’s fine to stick a router under their desk (on the network) that causes chaos at the customer’s end. Or maybe some well-meaning IT consultant decides it’s a good idea to lock down the firewall at 9:30 on a Monday morning. When things aren’t working as advertised, the quicker you can remotely diagnose and fix the problem, even if it has nothing to do with your service per-se, the happier the customer will be.
One thing that web hosting companies are not known for is stellar customer service. In fact, in my experience they treat support as a chore or even worse, as an expense to be minimized. In addition, it takes highly trained technicians to be able to remotely troubleshoot network issues like the ones described above, and those are the obvious ones. What happens when there are jitter or latency problems .. those are much more difficult to troubleshoot, especially from a remote location. Successful Hosted PBX companies like Versature excel at this.
The web hosting companies that we use actually make it impossible to find a phone number to call, instead asking you to enter a ticket into their system or to send an email. Customer’s who can’t make or receive phone calls are not going to be happy with this level of service. We’ve had many customers move to Versature after a nightmare support experience with another provider who was ill-prepared for the support burden that comes with deploying Voice Over IP solutions to SMB customers. If web hosting companies try to add this service to their offerings, I think that we will be adding many more.
One of the Top 10 Considerations When Choosing Hosted PBX has to do with Support/Customer Service. We believe it is one of the key components that totally makes or breaks your experience with a Hosted PBX provider. Web Hosting is a commodity .. Voice services are not. Ask yourself, do you really want your lowest-price web hosting company providing the phone service for your company? I didn’t think so.
Want to test drive our support? Go ahead and call 877-498-3772 and hit Option 3 for support. You will chat with a live Ottawa-based support representative who would be happy to help you in english or french. Go ahead and try that as a pre-sales test with our competitors .. I think you’ll be surprised with the results.
