One of the most important decisions that you have to make as a business owner is buying a new VoIP software. Before you can buy the best business VoIP software, there must be a lot of evaluation and planning. Ideal business VoIP software for your business requires planning ahead of time in order for you to be able to choose the best and to have no problems concerning its implementation. Consulting the best business VoIP software reviews is one of the most crucial steps in the process of purchasing a good VoIP tool for your business.
Unfortunately, even the best plans would sometimes fail and your mistakes would be a slap on the face. This is you may accidentally overlook something or perhaps the VoIP software that you purchased proved to be not as good as what you expected from the vendor. Moreover, the vendor’s products and services turned out to be substandard and not at par with the latest technology that your business needs. In order to avoid a potential mistake when purchasing your next VoIP system, you need to have an idea about what could possibly go wrong if you purchase the wrong VoIP tool.
Moreover, knowledge of what a bad business VoIP tool is essential in teaching you a lesson about what kind of VoIP software to buy for your business. Without an idea about bad VoIP software, there is no way that you can possibly come up with a good solution to problems and challenges that your business is facing when it comes to communications. Here are five characteristics of bad VoIP software that you should avoid purchasing:
There is a proprietary hardware
Every good quality VoIP tool for your business does not require their clients with proprietary technology. This means that the vendor of the VoIP software that you are about to purchase does not tout proprietary hardware as an added feature or benefit of a VoIP system. In that case, what a vendor should emphasize to you in order to get your loyalty is good call quality, customer service and system features for that specific VoIP system that it wants you to buy.
If your VoIP software is tied up to a proprietary hardware, then one problem is that you will have to change service providers every time you have to make changes in terms of phone numbers. With a proprietary hardware, there is always the hassle of having to make unnecessary and costly changes whenever new numbers are to be added to the system if there are new employees hired or if there is a new department that has to be established.
With many commercialized VoIP solutions, there is always a more built-in functionality. Such ideal VoIP systems for your business are actually jam packed with multiple features that make it not tied up with any proprietary hardware. Moreover, the built-in functionality of the VoIP software – with its chat applications, phone presence, integration with Google MAPs, customizable phone books and CRM applications, there is always a guarantee that it does not have a proprietary hardware.
These VoIP systems are instead managed and administered through an intuitively easy Web GUI interface. In fact, even without proprietary hardware, these VoIP tools can be efficiently used by supervisors to easily record and monitor calls.
There is no system setup and training
Aside from not having proprietary hardware, an ideal VoIP tool that your business can use must have the necessary system setup and training that comes with its purchase. Whenever you sign up with a VoIP provider, you should know that you will have to go through an “onboarding process” and the last thing that you would want to happen to you is that you will have a box of phones coming to your office one day without any guidance or support from the vendor especially when it comes to how to set them up. Actually, this is not as uncommon as people would think since many vendors are just ready to leave you unattended once they get your check.
Thus, the most important thing to do is to make sure that your VoIP system provider offers you the best support and training starting with how to set up the phones. This is what an ideal onboarding process should look like. In any case, the best thing you should do is that you should make sure that your vendor will not leave you in the lurch right after you make your payment. Every good VoIP provider will offer you and your employees very good setup and training services in order to make sure that the business is up and running in no time without any hassle that can impact your daily operations.
In fact, one of the biggest benefits that a commercial VoIP solution can give you is that it is a fully documented complete solution that must necessarily come with some type of technical support. Whenever you deal with commercialized VoIP solutions, it is almost always complete with all the necessary features like unified messaging as well as integration with data applications. Very good VoIP tools also come with complete fully packed functionality that includes fully customizable IVRs as well as call recording and reporting. All these are easily set up and all have been fully tested.
However, it is not true that you get all of these open-sourced solutions all at once. However, whatever happens, what you can do is that you have to ensure that training and support are both provided by your vendor.
It has poor data and call transmission
The most important thing that every VoIP software should have is excellent or at least a very satisfactory call quality. When it comes to the implementation of a VoIP phone system for your business, if you have no good call quality, then you will have a hard time routing calls from one point to another.
In order to ensure that the VoIP system has excellent call quality, then it should indicate the number and location of data centers that a specific vendor has. The more data centers your vendor has, the closer one of their centers is to your business location, and the better it is. Thus, if your business location is near the data center of your vendor you can be sure that your calls will be of very good quality.
Moreover, another technical factor concerning this important feature of a business VoIP system is that you have to make sure that your vendor actually sends your calls through an excellent route. This route must be one that has no hassles. After all, the longer the calls will take, the more delays you can expect and the worse the consequences are. That is why you have to make sure that call quality must either be equal to or better than your traditional POTS.
It has no backup plan
Every good VoIP system comes with a good backup plan, thus offering much more than a traditional phone system at a much lower cost. A backup system is indispensable just in case your business encounters a very unfortunate service interruption that turns out to be beyond your control. If you have a backup plan you will have a fall back in case your system is interrupted.
Reviews of VoIP Software reveal that a good backup plan will instantly bring confidence to you and your employees as this is a guarantee that should the whole system fail – although it is unlikely – you will have nothing to worry about. The backup plan acts as a shield against which you can actually
It has issues with customer support
If your business has already installed the VoIP software that you just bought, then you will have to mainly interact with the customer service department of your vendor. The problem is that this is where a lot of vendors fail. Their biggest weakness is that it takes a very long average response time for clients to get support. Sometimes, channels are also not available with certain VoIP systems. There are also times where the time zone of the support team is limited. All these are issues that have to be addressed before you will even purchase a VoIP system.
Whatever happens, the heart and soul of your business and of every other business is customer satisfaction. In fact according to Alex Desberg, the sales and marketing director of Ohio.net, VoIP software is the one thing that makes personalization of customer service possible. This is in order to leverage technology, to increase company efficiency and to increase overall profits.
The best VoIP solutions for your business will be those that can guarantee customer happiness and satisfaction. If you carefully select a VoIP software that has excellent features for customer satisfaction, then you can always expect your customers to stay loyal to you. After all, what is profit but repeat business.
As long as you do not purchase a VoIP tool that has proprietary hardware or one that has no training and support that comes with it, then you are on the right track so far. Moreover, it should have a backup plan, excellent data transmission and most of all features that bring about excellent customer satisfaction. If you make a mistake in buying the wrong VoIP software for your business, it will be a big blow to your profit in the long run. CrowdReviews.com has a list of the most highly recommended business VoIP software for your company, so go check it out.
Keith Moore
Latest posts by Keith Moore (see all)
- What Is the Best PoS Software and How to Choose It? - January 12, 2017
- What Does Database Management Software Do for Small Businesses? - January 9, 2017
- What Are the Distinct Features of the Top App Development Software? - January 8, 2017