THE TOP 3 REASONS VOIP INSTALLATIONS GO BADLY

In the VoIP world, businesses spend a lot of time and research attempting to determine the ideal solution. This process can take months or even years to identify possible suppliers that meet an organization’s specific needs. At the same time, those involved experience massive pressure to make the best decision.

So if this is the case, why is it that decision makers frequently get it wrong?

In our experience, it often comes down to the sales process and the many questions that are not asked. While the big stuff receives plenty of time and attention, other important items such as paging or calling groups can slip through the cracks. Then there are challenges like a smooth rollout, ensuring a high adoption rate, and user training; any of these aspects can completely disrupt an otherwise successful deployment.

Here are a few tips to keep your VoIP communications project on track for a better chance of success.

Set Clear Project Expectations from the Start
Multi-site businesses may have many departments spread across various sites. While each of them may commonly use features such as phone, call queuing and chat, there is a good possibility these locations also have unique requirements.

Maybe one office location requires hot desking while another requires call recording or other specific features. For the project to succeed, all these unique requirements must be brought forward early in the discovery process and accounted for in a final solution.

Insist on a Well-defined, Needs-Based Evaluation
Once project expectations are clearly defined, it is essential that any evaluation process must center around those specific needs. As we all know, sales teams may be excellent at showing off product highlights while minimizing deficiencies, even when it is not in the client’s best interests. It is important to insist that calls and solution demonstrations are unbiased to ensure conversations are focused on what matters while also pointing out potential challenges and other drawbacks.

Get Clarity on the Full Implementation Process
A VoIP implementation primarily goes askew after the contract signing. Some vendors do a poor job of communicating the client needs and what promises were made by the sales team to the implementation team. As a result, the solution as delivered may have numerous oversights that require a significant effort to resolve.

The best way to avoid this problem is to clarify how the deployment will happen, note timelines, and provide detailed information on the system design, programming, and testing phases.