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4 Steps to Successful VoIP Deployment

You know your business needs VoIP - what next? One obvious answer would be choosing the right VoIP provider - but there are some precautions that you can take in the planning phase that will allow you to avoid the most common mistakes. Here are a few of the best tips for implementing VoIP.

1. Do a thorough network assessment
VoIP runs over the public Internet, so a VoIP implementation needs to be designed to ensure that voice traffic runs as smoothly as it does over the traditional phone network. What many businesses don’t know (or underestimate) is that VoIP runs over your LAN (Local Area Network) as well. The quality of a phone call can be impacted by matters as simple as having the right type of interoffice cabling (CAT 5 or 6), and ensuring that switches, not hubs (which serve the purpose of extending a network like an extension cord, but without repeating or strengthening the signal), are deployed within your network. Additional network considerations are to look at the firewall, and figure out whether the SIP ports need to be un-blocked.

Note: If any of this sound too technical to you, don’t worry; your provider should be able to walk you through a complete assessment and make recommendations on how to work with all aspects of your existing network. On the other hand, if this sounds too technical to the sales rep you’re speaking with, look for a new provider. A rep can’t make a good recommendation if he doesn’t know your network.

In addition to reviewing internal network needs, you should honestly evaluate whether or not your Internet connection can handle VoIP. Any company looking to run multiple calls over their Internet connection should request a dedicated line, like a T1, rather than cable or DSL. The shared nature of DSL and cable connections tend to cause quality issues that are typically unacceptable at your main office.

2. Do a complete business flow design
This is easily the most overlooked of all of the preparation items that you should consider when installing a VoIP system. In your haste to deploy, you might forget to properly plan for the way that a phone call is routed to various groups within the company via an attendant, either live or automated (For sales: press 1, for service: press 2, etc.). What will happen to calls that come into the company after hours? For a sales call center, do you want to route calls “equitably”, or have them routed to the top closer first? Or, a company may fail to plan for servicing calls that are not picked up by the intended recipient but should be made available to others within customer care (traditional services refer to this as a hunt group).

Even more common is for a business to deploy a solution knowing that these features exist, but without a plan for how each feature is to be deployed to appropriate users. You should select a partner for VoIP services who can help you build an effective “template” for how your calls will be routed throughout your business.

3. Implement a proper transition plan
Making the move to VoIP can be relatively painless if properly planned. The process will typically entail porting your existing numbers from your old service provider to your new VoIP provider’s system. If not managed properly by you and your VoIP provider this could be more complicated than it needs to be. There are two principal things to look out for when transitioning:

Have Internet access that is turned on and ready
It would seem obvious that the Internet connection needs to be live, but as many companies will elect to provision an additional data line to handle what will amount to increased Internet traffic, there isn’t always an established line to transition to.

1-800# porting lead time
Your company will need to allow for more time in porting over a toll-free number, something that is easily accounted for with a simple forwarding plan, but it must be set up before bulk number porting.

New office or “greenfield” scenarios typically don’t require porting as you are getting new numbers. However, it is important to purchase not only numbers to support your existing users but also to support planned growth. Otherwise, you will likely have numbers that are staggered versus following a simple, contiguous sequence.

Finally, you need to have a plan on what happens if something goes wrong in the transition. You should strongly consider a parallel conversion in which local network issues are identified and resolved before you give the go-ahead to port numbers.

4. Educating staff on new features
As with so much in business, the key variable in the proper implementation process is often not technical in nature, but human. A proper transition plan should include well thought out communication to employees about the impending transition, the new features that will be made available, and clear trainings and user manuals that will make your co-workers excited and supportive of the change. One of the key features of business VoIP is the ability for each employee to decide how each incoming call is treated. A sales rep may elect to have calls from a spouse forwarded on to his/her cell phone rather than being sent to voice mail immediately or have calls that he does not recognize sent to voice mail. This new-found independence can either be a wonderful feature/benefit if the user is properly trained, or downright intimidating/frustrating if the user is not prepared. You should expect that your provider will be able to assist you in delivering proper documentation and tips and best practices for internal deployments and ensuring adoption. These tools can go a long way toward demystifying business VoIP for employees.

By paying attention to the preceding four areas and choosing a provider that is skilled in both the technical aspect of VoIP and the practical business needs of SMBs, you will find that VoIP can be all that you had hoped it would be and more.