Choosing a telephony solution shouldn’t just be about price

By Marizette Topham, National Sales Manager, Euphoria Telecom

It’s tempting, when shopping around for a business telephone solution, to focus on cost per minute pricing.

Let’s face it, cost per minute is easy to understand, it’s easy to compare, and telecoms providers aren’t exactly known for making their pricing simple and transparent.

But while it’s understandable that cents per minute gets a lot of attention, there is a lot more that goes into a telephony service.

At Euphoria Telecom we are proud to provide industry-leading business phone solutions at highly competitive rates.

This is our tenth year in operation and as pioneers in the South African marketplace, we know what it takes to deliver good, reliable telephony.

There are several key factors that prospective cloud PBX customers need to factor in when making a new purchase decision…

Call quality – a lower cost per minute isn’t going to help much if your call quality is bad. On voice calls, we add a third party tool called ViBE. It creates a VPN into our cloud, strips out the voice headers and makes the voice packets as small as possible, which makes voice quality more stable.

This is also why we recommend getting a separate connection for voice. Yes, it adds to the cost – but it gives much better quality than sharing the same link for voice and data.

Cost transparency – when we compare quotes customers send to us, or even their current bills, it’s difficult to work out exactly what they’re being charged for.

They don’t necessarily get detailed itemised accounts, there are long-term contracts attached, services have been added as the company grew and so on.

Then the customer goes out of contract on some services but is still in contract on others. And there are variable costs because of exchange rate fluctuations.

One of the things that sets us apart is that we’re a locally developed solution tailored for the local market – we’re not licensing an overseas product with dollar fees. We provide 24×7 local support with a local cost structure. We give you an itemised bill.

And we give you an industry leading Telephone Management System (TMS) that lets you control your costs down to an extension level. With us you can see how much you spent, who you phoned, and how long the calls were.

You can blacklist or whitelist. You can restrict outbound calling if you’re an inbound call centre, or set a cost limit per extension for employees that don’t need to make many calls. You can go prepaid or postpaid. It’s all visible to you, and as a result is easy to control.

Cloud telephony – cloud telephony provides substantial benefits over more traditional, onsite PBXs. If you need to add extensions or new features, you need to add a card. You need to pay for a SIP trunk.

While initial costs may be cheaper, your ongoing management and maintenance costs are significant. And they rise as you add extensions. And then there’s the cost to replace the entire system as it gets old and obsolete.

Euphoria is a cloud-based telephone solution provider, which means you don’t need to replace your system every three years. We also offer month-to-month agreements so if we don’t deliver what we promise, you can leave, and take the handsets you’ve acquired with you to your next provider.

But we’re confident in our system and service, which is why our customer attrition rate remains low. In fact, the very first customer we signed up a decade ago is still with us on a month to month contract.

People are rate sensitive and understandably so. They focus on the per minute price and don’t generally factor in the lifetime cost of an entire solution.

But once you consider call rate plus service, you may well find you’re saving money on a solution with a higher cost per minute.

Add in visibility into your employees’ calling habits, responsive local support, and detailed control of your company’s telephony, and you may discover that the ‘higher’ cost is actually much more cost-effective.