Pre-Sale

1. What type of experience do you have in the telecom industry and which companies have you worked for?

2. How many quotes am I to expect from your company and which carriers will they be coming from?

3. What kind of fee do you charge and how do you base this cost?

4. What kind of billing increments and surcharges are involved or included in the pricing?

Post Sale

5. Who handles the account after we sign the contract? Does this go to a provisioning team or project coordinator? Do you stay involved with this process?

6. When there is a service outage whom do we contact?

7. When there are billing issues or credits due, whom do we contact?

8. When our first bill comes in who will go through that with us to make sure we were charged what we were quoted?

9. Do you perform quarterly follow-ups to all of your customers to ensure that they are satisfied with the service?

10. At the end of our term what happens? Who will contact us with updated pricing and terms?

Things to pay attention to:

Does the sales representative take the time to understand your business, or he just selling you something? Why is this important?

The importance of understanding your business is vital to offering you the correct telecom services.

A simple example of this is call patterns for long distance calls.

A carrier can offer a great rate for state to state calls, but if a majority of the calls are made in-state, this doesn’t help lower your overall long distance bill.

Again, a very simple example, but understanding how your business operates really helps us offer you the proper services that will enable your telecom systems to run more efficiently.

Post from: Business Long Distance, Telecom, Voice T1, Business Voip Blog

Top 10 Questions To Ask Before Choosing Your Next Telecom Provider

Technorati Tags: business long distance, carriers, providers, Telecom

1. Watch out for billing tricks. Ask what is the billing increment the carrier will use?

Many times a $.03 rate will be closer to $.05 or even higher because of their billing tricks. Instead of the standard 18/6 billing, they’ll round up your call in 30 or 60 second increment.

What this means to you is… if you’re on a call for 1 minute and 5 seconds, they’ll round up your call to either 1 minute and 30 seconds or 2 minutes. As you can see, this can easily raise your bill by 50-95%. I’ve seen the horror stories of this shady practice.

2. Beware of sites that show a listing of carriers and their rates.

Not only can you fall victim to the 60 second billing trick, you’ll still have to contact all the carriers yourself to determine the best rate plan for your business. And this can be very time consuming.

These sites aim to confuse you with their gimmicky rate calculators hoping you won’t do your homework and just choose what looks best.

But as you know, what looks best isn’t always the case. These sites serve one purpose, to make a referral commission off you. They’re not their job to help you in choosing the best plan for your business.

Also, these sites represent resellers and not long distance carriers you are more familiar with, such as AT&T, Qwest, Sprint and Verizon. This can be advantageous but you have to do your homework. If a reseller goes out of business that means your long distance service is out of business, too.

If your long distance isn’t important for you, then it won’t matter which carrier you choose but if it’s important to you, then you need expert advice in choosing the best and most stable carrier.

3. If you’re interested in a name brand carrier, ATT, Verizon, Sprint or Qwest, be prepared to deal with a call center telemarketer.

You will have NO representation, they will not sell you the best rate plan for your business and you still have to deal with their customer service anytime you have issues or problems.

I don’t know about you, I’ve wasted enough time talking to clueless customer service reps, especially ones from other countries.

4. Be careful of the one size fits all type of plans.

If you don’t get proper one on one attention, then there is no way a simple web form and/or wizard is going to give you an idea what is the best long distance plan for you.

There are many different factors that will go into effect, such as in state vs out of state calling, international, do you have enough minutes to qualify for a voice t1, do you need voip or sip termination. As you can see with all the options out there, one would be crazy to trust their telecom services over to a website.

5. Is the site only offering business VOIP service?

If that’s the case, then they really do not understand the needs of businesses and their telecom infrastructure.

Many of these sites are aiming for the residential or the home business market, they just happen to be on the first page of google when you are searching.

6. Sites that offer for you to fill out a form.

They get you thinking they are going to take care of you. The forms are long and seem endless. But this is only good if you like sales reps from 6-7 people to be calling you.

These site make it look like they will be the ones handling your business but instead, they either sell your name to 6-7 other companies or they hand you off to several other companies because they are nothing more than affiliates.

You can call me directly at 1-888-256-2925 or contact me here for a free consultation so I can show you how to drastically reduce your long distance and/or data costs.

Post from: Business Long Distance, Telecom, Voice T1, Business Voip Blog

Business Long Distance – 6 Traps To Be Aware Of Before Choosing a Telecom Provider

Technorati Tags: business long distance, long distance carriers, long distance service, rate calculators, referral commission, voice t1

If you are looking for business long distance rates, dedicated long distance T1’s or any telecom service , you can check the page section of our blog.

You can reach us at 1-888-256-2925 or by email.

Post from: Business Long Distance, Telecom, Voice T1, Business Voip Blog

Welcome To WorldNet Solutions Blog

Technorati Tags: business long distance, Marketing, rates, sales, Telecom, voice t1