I'm about fed up with phone systems. Back in the day, I didn't
understand why the phone system vendors charged $10k to install a $1200
phone system, but now I get it. You can have tens of man-hours invested
in making the tiniest phone system work exactly the way someone wants.
I'm starting to think you have to plan on being there in person for
awhile so they can immediately tell you what they don't like instead of
stewing on it for a week. I also think when there's a week of back and
forth on these adjustments we think of it as spending a week to make it
perfect for them, but when they talk about it it'll be the story of
their phones being all screwed up for a week.
So My new thinking is that I can't go low on price. I have to go high
so that I can afford to be there putting time into it, and if I can't
afford that time investment then I should let somebody else handle it.
And if they don't want to pay high, then they can figure out something
else. Maybe I could go low if they would agree to a recurring
maintenance contract, but I think most of the time they won't.
It does help to have a conversation up front about how things should
work, how calls should flow, what the IVR should do, etc. After I have
that conversation I write up an outline and/or flow chart describing my
interpretation of what we just talked about and email it to them. A lot
of the time I think they just agree with the written form without
reading it because we STILL end up with confusion sometimes, but at
least we start out closer to the mark. It doesn't help that there's a
terminology that is often unfamiliar to them....they say "voicemail",
but they really meant an auto attendant or IVR or something else.
Frankly, it's easier to just sell internet and let someone else be the
"phone guy", but for some reason people keep coming to us about phones.
-Adam
On 1/6/2021 10:51 AM, Nate Burke wrote:
I notice this mostly when I do phone setups. Try to get everything
configured the way the customer explains to you, then you install it
and tell the customer to test it and make sure it's doing what they
want. They say 'Yea, yea, it's fine' As they're putting on their coat
to leave for the day, since you made them stay an extra minute later
than they though. Then you don't hear anything more at all out of
them. Then about 6 weeks later you get a call "THESE PHONES ARE JUST
ALL BROKEN, THEY'VE NEVER WORKED RIGHT, YOU NEED TO COME FIX THEM
NOW!!!" Usually it's something stupidly simple like, 4 extensions are
ringing for inbound calls, and only 3 should ring. But suddenly it's a
crisis of business terminating proportions.
Over the holidays a customer with an ancient key system with no
answering service wanted us to provide voicemail for any incoming
calls for the 2 weeks of the holiday. OK, no problem, setup the
voicemail, and it sent out via email, I tested it with the office
Admin before break started, and it was all working fine. Then the
first day of the holiday they wanted to change the email address it
was sending the voicemails, to one of the owners. No problem, but
they never bothered to test the new email address, voicemails were
getting marked as spam by their system, and they only keep spam for 1
day. After break, they ask where all their voicemails were. For 2
weeks, you were not able to check that it's doing what you want? And
it never occurred you that you didn't see any voicemail coming through?
These are all small businesses, for something that is so critical to
them why don't they check and make sure they're doing what they want?
Everyone has a cell phone they can use to dial in, it would take them
about 2 minutes to check, but they just refuse to.
Ironically, many of these are also the same customers that will
religiously run speedtest.net on the hour, every hour, and let you
know if that little number on the screen is less than the last time it
ran.
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