We are seeing the era where ISPs become ITSP (Internet Telephony Service Providers) basically making any ISP a phone company as companies like Level3, Covad and Nuvio roll out private label phone product offerings in a pre-configured and bundled manner like this story reports on.
Thus this means customer ownership and customer service become the key to success. It's not just about selling the service, someone has to support the customer in many ways. An ISP who adds phone service needs to also offer rapid, real time, live phone support. Remember, when you call 611 you get phone repair, and the problem gets troubleshot in seconds and if the problem requires a truck roll then the appointment is set up rapidly. ISP's who become phone companies to their customers had better insure that they have the workforce and systems in place to support that type of response.
That's why cable companies in the USA that are rolling out VoIP are in such a strong position. They already have the customer service and fleet of technicians to go out and fix the problems. Can the little ISP that roars do that in the case of numerous outages and afford to stay in business.
The bottom line is unless you can support yourself or your company technically, make sure there is a real support team in place. Otherwise you won't be talking...to anyone.
By the way, how would one call support if VoIP was your only phone connection and that went down? More importantly, how would your ISP know you know longer were able to make calls?
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