What to know when choosing a VoIP provider

South African businesses looking for a voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) provider should prioritise factors like redundancy, call quality, cost, scalability, and security.

This is according to Euphoria Telecom managing director Warren Hawkins and Vox Telecom head of voice and visual communications Andrew King.

Hawkins told MyBroadband that business requirements have shifted in recent years.

“Businesses looking for a VoIP provider should be looking for multiple lines, caller ID, call-waiting, voicemail and conference calls as a minimum offering,” he said.

He also highlighted cost as an important consideration. However, he added that businesses shouldn’t compromise on the value they receive from a VoIP product or the service they receive from their provider.

“It’s an unfortunate truth, but the cost of doing business has increased, and the upcoming VAT increase will have most businesses looking at costs as a primary factor,” said Hawkins.

“That said, businesses need to weigh up costs versus value.”

He added that a cheaper monthly cost means nothing if you experience regulator outages.

“A documented service licence agreement that outlines uptime and response times to queries and outages is therefore essential,” he said.

Hawkins and King both highlighted call quality as a priority for businesses choosing a provider.

“Call quality is paramount,” said King.

He said high call quality helps showcase complexity, urgency, and emotion in telephonic communication.

Hawkins added that businesses should prioritise call quality and features that support individual business needs.

“Data analytics are all incredibly valuable to a business because they can enhance productivity and decision-making,” he said.

However, he added that feature-packed products are only valuable when businesses use them to their potential.

“A feature-packed package isn’t delivering value if your business is not making proper use of them,” Hawkins said.

“Businesses need to understand their needs and make decisions from there.”

He said businesses should consider the following when choosing the features they require:

• Call volumes and call types: Do you make many international calls? Are the calls mostly inbound or outbound?
• Team set-up: Does your team mainly work from the office, or are you still using a hybrid model?
• Collaboration: Do you need to integrate specific software? Do you need virtual conferencing?

King told MyBroadband that cloud PBX solutions provide businesses with a choice of platform that aligns with their current technology investments.

“Cloud PBX increasingly provides different platforms for the different functions or departments within the same organisation,” he said.

He also highlighted redundancy as a key consideration.

“A highly redundant and robust voice network that delivers call quality regardless of environmental factors beyond the operator’s control,” said King.

“The VoIP network should be configured with more than adequate bandwidth, multiple points of presence, and architected for in-region and cross-region redundancy.”

He added that it should also be able to scale with demand.

He said such a network will provide seamless failover of all VoIP traffic if a point of presence fails or needs to be taken offline for planned or emergency maintenance.

“It should go without saying that the operator has configured the network to auto-correct when an unforeseen event transpires, failover should be seamless and not require human intervention, and that customers don’t experience service unavailability during these events,” King added.

Hawkins agrees that VoIP products should be flexible and scalable to account for market volatility.

“A service provider who offers month-to-month contracts, and the ability to scale up and down depending on circumstances and needs, is essential,” he said.

King said a good VoIP provider should also actively monitor fraud on their networks to safeguard businesses and provide 24/7/365 support through a team of specialists to address issues in real time.