Five Tech Specs to look for in a Voice Platform.

When it comes to finding a Voice or UCaaS Provider, there are several elements to look out for. You want to know that your Provider has the know-how to support you to sell Voice solutions with confidence, especially if your organisation hasn’t traditionally sold Voice before.

Yet, enabling you to sell voice is only one part of the puzzle. Typically, 80% of the legwork in selling Voice, or Unified Communications, is on the shoulders of the pre-sales and technical engineers within the Managed Service Provider. The initial ‘door opening’ may happen with the account manager or Sales Director, but when it comes to delivering a successful Voice project – we’ve gotta hand it to the techies.

In this blog we switch the gears a little and focus on the Tech Specs that you want to look for in a Voice platform and Provider, especially if you’re responsible for pre-sales and delivery within your business.

Here they are:

Ease and Speed of Provisioning

It’s a ‘no brainer’ that the quicker you can deploy and provision a Voice solution, the quicker your client is set up and the faster your business can grow. You want to look for a Voice platform that will support you to deploy new environments within a day or two as opposed to 6-8 weeks down the track.

When you’re able to leverage an established and technically robust platform, you don’t need to setup the system, just like the ease of setting up Microsoft Office for employees, you should be able to deploy phone systems very smoothly and reliably, just as you would MS Applications.

One single pane of glass

It’s a techies dream when you can quote, scope, administer and maintain services and systems all from one place, and this is something you should expect from a Voice/UCaaS platform. When all Voice solutions are under one unified platform you can administer everything you need from there, ensuring you can be efficient with your time and train your technical delivery team effectively.

Disparate systems make the experience clunky for you as an MSP, and therefore clunky and difficult to demonstrate the implementation benefits to your clients. Not only that, having all elements in the one platform means you’ll be fully enabled (with some sound training of course!) to build the whole Voice/UCaaS solution yourself – giving you the confidence and autonomy to add clients with ease, expanding on your monthly recurring revenue month-on-month.

Luke Johnson is the Product Manager at VISITS, one of our long standing and trusted clients, here’s what he shared, “With minimal investment we’ve been able to scale our offering and expand our capability by leveraging Access4’s team and SASBOSS™ platform. I think many vendor programs are often let down by their onboarding, or lack thereof. They often just tick the necessary boxes, which is usually some form of basic sales and technical training. I think this is where Access4 differentiate themselves well, because they have a very structured and well thought out program which has allowed us to hit the ground running – very, very quickly.”

Luke continued, “We’ve been able to cut down our implementation effort with Access4’s SASBOSS™ platform, which has also made provisioning and support vastly simpler.” Check out the VISITS case study here.

Add more Services in one click

Look for a Voice platform that allows you to add on more services at a click of a button, again, this becomes more doable when you have a single pane of glass to work from. You want to look for a platform that enables you to add additional geographically dispersed contact centers, sites with 100+ people, additional porting, or additional phone numbers – with great simplicity, and 24 hours a day. Not only that, but you should also be able to bring on new clients with even more services, with just as much ease.

SASBOSS™ allows for this and is continually evolving and improving with the more feedback we receive from our Partner Technical community. We constantly survey the techies within our partners because we value their feedback and know that it strengthens our platform significantly.

24/7 Support

Every Voice platform should be complemented with up to 3rd and 4th level support, 24/7. If you don’t get this from your Provider, it might be time for a change. This is one of the critical differences with attempting to build your Voice platform internally. You miss out on the level of technical support that could save you from a very tough conversation with a client if their organisation’s phone systems or services go down.

Similarly, to effectively bake in your own 24/7 support, you’d need the servers and infrastructure to make sure that your client has redundancy if there’s a problem, whether on cloud or on-premises, there’s a significant need for ongoing maintenance and support that is very difficult to manage internally.

A platform built by techies.

If your organisation is looking into expanding your Voice offering or perhaps you’ve begun building your own internal platform with a few clients leveraging services, you’ll know that it’s not as simple as connecting in some phone lines.

Technical robustness in a platform is an absolute must when it comes to deploying, supporting, and maintaining your clients’ Voice environments effectively.

You want to look for solutions and platforms that are built by techs, people that have history and experience in Voice engineering know what it is that needs to be baked into a Voice platform that will meet your clients evolving requirements and make your selling and implementation efforts easeful, especially now with the growth and demands of remote working.

Access4’s SASBOSS™ platform was launched by its three Founders Tim Jackson, Stan Chizhevskiy and Sajeewa Warnakulasuriya who all come from the Voice industry with years of deep technical experience and understanding from all sides of the channel, either within MSP organisations or managing large Telco projects.

SASBOSS™ was designed from years of experimentation and learning, complemented by a fast-growing technical team. This means the Voice platform is built by techs, for techs – which gives you an obvious leg up when looking to simplify out the technical load of bringing new customers onto Voice services. You have a solid team to leverage, powered by a solid platform.