As with many industries, the business telephone sector has its share of low cost providers.
I recently got a call from a businessperson in the Sacramento area who went with a low cost VoIP provider to save some money.
The caller told me that he immediately found the provider’s customer service to be “non-existent”. The provider blamed the office’s internet connection for voice quality problems, even though the internet was working fine and had plenty of available bandwidth.
The caller said that when he started getting bills, he found that the provider’s total costs were marginally less than those of other VoIP providers. There were unanticipated add-on fees and other charges.
The net result was that the caller’s business got vastly inferior customer support for the almost same amount of money.
For many businesses like the caller’s, a properly functioning telephone system is mission critical.
It’s always good to save a few dollars here and there, but what if more revenue is placed at risk each month than is saved? What if that risk becomes a reality?
At Fortis, it costs us more to staff our El Dorado Hills office with qualified VoIP and IT technicians than it would to pay for overseas techs.
However, the higher cost to us means that customer service requests are responded to fast. Issues are resolved quickly.
It also costs us to spend time walking our new customers through the process of preparing for the transition to VoIP.
Because we spend this time, our customers have the right level of internet service and the proper network setup before the VoIP switch is flipped to “on.”
Cut-rate pricing is alluring. But the low price may come at high a cost.
