6 Questions To Ask Before Choosing A VoIP Provider

Switching phone providers is easier than most people expect. There is no downtime, your numbers move across, and your operations carry on while it happens. The hard part is not the switch. It is working out, before you sign, whether the provider you are moving to is actually better than the one you are leaving.

These six questions do most of that work. Ask them during the sales process, when you still have leverage.

1. What are the costs that are not on the price page?

   Not the monthly rate, which every provider publishes. Setup fees, charges for individual features, toll-free numbers, on-site technician visits, and what it costs to cancel. Insist on all of it upfront and in writing. You may not need an on-site visit today, but you should know what one costs before you find out the hard way.

2. What support do I get after the sale?

   Everyone is attentive while they are selling. Ask what happens afterwards. Can you reach support by phone as well as email? What hours? Will someone come to your office if a quality problem cannot be fixed remotely, and is that billed? Support is the single biggest difference between providers, and it is the hardest thing to judge from a website.

3. Where are your servers?

   Distance affects call quality and delay. The closer the servers, the better the calls. Do not assume a local provider runs local infrastructure, because plenty of them do not, and it is a fair question with a factual answer.

4. Do you own the platform, or resell someone else’s?

   A reseller cannot change the platform, cannot fix it, and cannot escalate any faster than you could. If the answer is that they resell, ask who the actual provider is and what happens when that relationship ends.

5. If there is a contract, what am I getting for it?

   Contracts are not automatically bad, but they should buy you something specific. Free handsets, a discounted rate, guaranteed response times. Ask what you get in exchange for the commitment, and ask who owns the hardware when the term ends. If a provider wants three years and offers nothing in return, that tells you what the relationship will be like.

6. How long have you been operating?

   A provider that has run a network for years has already solved the problems a newer one is about to learn on your account. Ask how long they have been operating, and how long they have served businesses your size in your city.

What good answers sound like

You are not looking for perfect answers. You are looking for specific ones. A provider who says “we would need to check” about where their servers sit, or who cannot give you a cancellation figure, has told you something useful. So has one who answers all six without hesitating.

For what it is worth, ours are: no setup fees and no contracts, phone and email support from a Vancouver team that comes on site, servers in Canada, our own platform rather than a resold one, and 13 years serving small businesses in this city. Our plans and pricing are public if you want to check the first one yourself.