With so much new technology, including Voice over IP (VOIP), coming to the office today, small business owners and managers are increasingly challenged to maintain their systems. They face the ordeal of making multiple vendors with overlapping responsibilities accountable for systems that must work together.

Poor customer service from a vendor can result in an entire office being off-line or unable to receive normal call volume for hours, or even days. Few companies really specialize in providing prompt, personal solutions in this market.

Large companies hire technical specialists as permanent employees to maintain their telecom equipment and carrier services. Small and medium sized companies most likely look to their network administrator, office manager or other administrative person to maintain their telecommunications equipment and service. When telecom issues arise, both large and small companies often rely upon outside vendors and carriers to solve these problems as quickly as possible.

Carriers are notorious for their weak customer service, relying on multi-level auto-attendants and remote call centers to minimize their cost in responding to customer questions and service issues. Small carriers and resellers often do not have qualified staff to provide good customer service. Typically very strong in their customer acquisition process - sales - carriers, especially, are very weak in after-sales customer service.

Business customers may be unaware of this weakness in their carrier's customer service process until they lose their telephone or data connection completely or have a serious intermittent service issue. Loss of service is a rude wake-up call that makes everyone suddenly appreciate the trade-off made in selecting the lowest cost provider or vendor.

Telecom equipment vendors may leave customers in a similar predicament. In order to capture new business, a vendor must be very competitive in pricing equipment. As compared to selling, post-sale service is another challenge altogether.

Some equipment vendors may be technically competent but not have a customer service orientation or friendly personality. You may discover when calling on your vendor, that they are non-responsive to your "emergency" and not especially good at dealing with customers on routine issues either.

For the vendor's customer service person, it often takes finesse, or at least careful listening and gentle questioning, to respond appropriately to a customer with telecom issues.

How to choose a vendor?

In the first place, you should make it part of your decision criteria for purchasing equipment, a conscious decision to hire a mature, service-focused vendor. Choose carefully. It requires a savvy customer who understands these issues to assure a wise choice of vendor.

When purchasing new equipment, most people focus on the feature set and initial cost. They may assume the after-sales customer support is everything that the sales executive claims it to be.

Based on experience, we know that a sales person will always claim to have outstanding or excellent customer service. Whether the company actually has in place the organization, training, technology and culture to really meet customer expectations for after-sales service is irrelevant to most telecom sales people. Their mission is to close the sale.

The Solution

How do you minimize problems with your office phones? Be selective in your choice of vendor. You are not just purchasing equipment. You are looking for a vendor with an outstanding reputation for service. You are hiring a vendor to install and maintain your telecom system. That's right; consider your purchase to be a hiring decision.

If you work at it, you can find vendors out there, who offer outstanding technical support with a highly professional approach to customer service - before and after the sale.

Help is Available

Most everyone knows the frustration of dealing with telecom carriers and vendors. A good equipment vendor should work to alleviate this frustration by helping to solve customer telecom problems - both hardware and carrier related. In this way customers really benefit from the vendor expertise and experience, and feel "cared for" in a more personal way.

Telecom customer service should be a pleasurable experience!