What do I need to know before transitioning my business to VoIP?

From Bandipedia

A proper VoIP installation plan executed with the assistance of a top tier provider can make you wonder how you ever lived without VoIP, but missing a couple of key and seemingly minor checkpoints can cause potential outages, severe headaches, and make you convinced that VoIP is a four letter word for more than one reason.

How can you save money, add significant features, improve call quality and otherwise tap all of the amazing resources a strategically implemented business VoIP system can offer? One obvious answer would be choosing the right VoIP provider for you, but even before you get to the purchase decision phase there are some simple steps that you can take in preparation and planning that will allow you avoid past mistakes of early adopters. These companies learned their lessons the hard way and as a result, you don’t have to.

A small business can prepare for a move to VoIP by focusing on 4 key areas:

1. Thorough network assessments: Most businesses know that VoIP runs over the public internet and that a VoIP system needs to be designed such that voice traffic runs as smoothly over it as it does over the traditional phone system. What many businesses don’t know, or if they do know, they underestimate, is that VoIP runs over a customer’s 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 is recommended), 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 a customer’s network. Additional details can include whether a company has a firewall, and whether the ports that permit the two most common VoIP protocols SIP and MGCP ports are blocked. If any of this sound too technical to you, don’t worry, as a good provider will 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, a review of the Internet Access that will be used to deliver VoIP should occur. Internet connections should be over dedicated lines (as opposed to cable or DSL) or higher if more than one phone call are to be supported. In other words, it is fine to give a worker a phone to bring home to run over their broadband connection, but the shared nature of DSL and cable connections tend to cause quality issues that wouldn’t otherwise be noticed as a user surfs the internet.

2. A complete business flow design: This is easily the most overlooked of all of the preparation items a company should consider when installing a VoIP system. In a company’s haste to deploy VoIP it 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 I want to route calls “equitably”, or have them routed to my top closer first? Or, a company may fail to plan for servicing calls that aren’t picked up by the intended recipient but should be made available to others within a work group at a company (often called a hunt group feature). Even more common is for a business to look to deploy a solution knowing that these features exist but without properly planning out each feature. Each employee’s phone should be considered for each feature that they have with their current system, and which of VoIP’s new features should be made available to them. These are just a few of the questions that typically merit consideration, however you should select a partner for VoIP services who has already thought through all this and help you quickly build an effective “template” for your calls so that they will be routed throughout your business.

3. Implement a proper transition plan: Making the move to VoIP can be completely painless if properly planned. But as you might expect, there are some things to look out for. For instance, transitioning to VoIP 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 potentially fraught with peril. Normally, it is a good idea to begin the porting process 7-14 days ahead of time just in case issues with the original POTS provider arise. There are two principal things to look out for when transitioning: 1. Internet access that is turned on and ready 2. 1-800# porting 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. On the 1-800# issue, the 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 for a new business or new location. However, here 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. You should strongly consider a parallel conversion in which local network issues are troubleshot before you give the go-ahead to port numbers.

4. Educating staff on newly available features: As with so much in business, the key variable in the proper implementation 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, have calls that he doesn’t recognize sent to voice mail, and calls from a top customer routed to the cell phone and then a home phone. This newfound independence can either be a wonderful feature/benefit if the user is properly trained, or downright intimidating and frustrating if the user isn’t prepared. You should expect that your provider will be able to assist you in delivering proper documentation, templates for team meetings, and tips and best practices for internal deployments and ensuring adoption. These tools can go a long way in demystifying business VoIP for employees.

By paying attention to the preceding 4 areas AND choosing a provider that is skilled in both the technical aspect of VoIP and the practical business needs of SMBs, you’ll find that VoIP can be all that you had hoped it would be and more.

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