Answer Center Blog

Cheap phone company? Bad Bargain? Ditto for answering service?

Tweet

 

We're all trying to save money, but one false economy is to choose a phone company that offers service for $29.95 per year - or anything like that price.  I'd include Vonage, Magic Jack, Smart Jack, Google Voice in the "not brilliant choices" list.  Why not?

Vonage et al DO advertise to home consumers - and they're great for families and home use.  The problem is that they aren't reliable enough for a business.  Many calls come through crystal clear, but quite a few don't go through at all, or get "snap crackle pop" voice connections.  Imagine a first time customer calling your business and getting a bad connection.  They hang up and call someone else.  Save $50 per month on your phone bill, but losing a customer who might spend thousands isn't a bargain.

Additionally with some, you cannot keep your current phone number when you change. How many of your current customers can you afford to lose?

Vonage, et al are great, low cost ways to avoid long distance charges, and are wonderful for families separated by college, travel, or immigration.  They aren't bad as "backup phones" for a business, or for making overseas calls.  Even in a home situation though, I'd be reluctant to have one of those as my ONLY phone.  Specific weaknesses:

• No SLA - with a "service level agreement" your telco has to guarantee 99.999% to 99.99999% uptime, and once notified of a problem has to start working on it almost immediately.  Without an SLA, your phone service could be out for days - and you just wait until someone fixes the problem. 
• No internet - no phone. No electricity - no phone.  A Katrina like event could leave your business or home without phone service for days or weeks.  For business, a higher priced cell phone or a land line is a better choice as the primary line.
• Public internet - voice travels on the internet cloud as digital packets - which can get scrambled or lost if the transfer speed drops.  With any public internet based phone, the call quality is dependent on traffic.  If you talk to any internet phone vendor and they don't guarantee "private backbone internet" and an SLA of at least 99.999%, they're really selling home phone service.
• A word about Google Voice.  It's really inexpensive - and you get exactly what you pay for.  Not a whole lot of reliability.  Can you live with 10% to 20% of your callers getting disconnected?  If you're using it for your employees or your family a failure rate may be acceptable... for customers, not so much.  Many office phone systems have almost all of the capabilities of Google Voice.  In essence the technology of "follow-me forwarding" has been around for years, though traditional "dialing trees" are usually less flexible than the Google product.  Many answering services including ours can offer this same product if your office phone system doesn't include centrex functions.

Before you think about choosing a telephone company - think about how your customers reach you - then decide how important that phone connection is.  If you run a pizza restaurant or are a plumber, probably 99.9% of your customers first meet you over the phone, and rely on continuing to spend their dollars with you via phone.  A Hardee's or Burger King that rely on walk-in and drive-in business... those businesses might get away with having a cheaper phone carrier.

Capacity - Many very small CLEC's (competitive local exchange) providers have only one switch in an area.  If that switch has a problem it could take a long time for phone service to be restored.  I don't really like praising Verizon, but they are "Ma Bell" and have had switching centers set up all over the place since the 1880's.  On 9/11 two Verizon offices were destroyed or heavily damaged... But Verizon was able to restore most of Manhattan's phone service within 48 hours by rerouting hundreds of thousands of numbers to other central offices.  Another provider located in the twin towers NEVER restored service to local customers.  You can save a lot of money by going to a "Ma Bell" competitor, but ask a few questions first.  The first question is: "How many CO's (central offices) do you have, where are they located and what kind of disaster plan do you have in case the local one burns or is flooded?  Another good question is: "Is the CO manned 24/7?"  Most aren't, but customer service can often reset or fix situations remotely. 

A good phone system - or a good answering service for that matter - is something you rely on every day you are in business, so choose something you don't have to worry about!