Are you getting your money`s worth from your voice provider?

We take our ability to make telephone calls so much for granted that it`s tempting to believe it`s a simple thing to achieve. If that was ever true, it isn`t any more. During the past 10 years the technology of telephony has changed so rapidly - from the advent of cellphones to voice over IP - that Alexander Graham Bell wouldn`t recognise it.

The technological changes that have brought us mobility, to name just the most important benefit, have also created an entire new industry. The market is crowded with companies providing an array of telecommunications products and services to business customers, all claiming their solutions will improve communications and cut costs.

It`s a confusing landscape for a customer, made even more difficult to navigate by the fact that it`s often difficult to find out whether you`re really getting what you expect. It`s easy for a service provider to diagnose problems and implement solutions, then claim that the customer is saving money: but how do you prove it?

All too often, once a contract is signed the service provider loses interest; very few provide ongoing monitoring and evaluation as part of their service. The customer who wants to find out what`s really going on either has to do the sums himself, appoint an outside consultant or cajole the service provider into doing it, a process which can be expensive and time consuming. If there is a problem, it can take months to discover.

For example, consider a typical customer, a medium-sized company with seven long-established branches around the country. Telephony decisions have always been made at branch level, so the company finds itself with seven different PABX systems, seven least-cost routing providers and seven accounts clerks each with their own way of handling the bills. There are massive opportunities here to optimise communications in the group, for example by routing inter-branch calls over a private network and implementing a call centre. But the technology involved is complex. For the hapless IT manager who is called on to reassure his board that he`s found the optimal solution, answers can be hard to find.

This is a situation that hundreds of companies have faced or are facing. The scarcity of IT skills, which leaves managers little or no time to tinker with solutions once they`ve implemented, only makes it worse. This explains why we see such hunger in the market for service providers who can not only implement telephony solutions, but also manage them to ensure that they work optimally, consistently and effortlessly.

The days of the box-dropper in the telephony space are over. What customers want now is not just a technology project with the promise of savings, but objective evidence that they are saving - and getting the right levels of service - in the medium to long term.

To get that, customers need to choose service providers with whom they can build relationships. If you`re in the market for a telephony solution, make sure you ask about what you`ll be getting in the long term.