Cloud Therapy: E027 – VoIP Integration

November 8, 2016 Aerocom

CT-E027 - VoIP IntegrationLearn what technologies your company can integrate with your VoIP phone system that will make your employees more productive and happier at work.

Sangar Safi, sales engineer from Jive Communications joins Mike to tell a real customer story of a company that didn’t realize how many additional applications they could integrate with their Jive hosted VoIP service… and how ecstatic their employees were when they experienced what could be integrated.

Which 3 VoIP providers integrate with your software? Click below.

TRANSCRIPT:

Mike: Cloud Therapy Episode 27. Hey, IT Nation! Welcome to Cloud Therapy with Aerocominc.com where you learn about the latest cloud and telecom technology that is gonna take your career to the next level. I’m your host, Mike Smith. Let’s do it.
Hello, IT professionals, near and far, thank you for joining us on another great episode of Cloud Therapy. I know everybody is gonna get something out of today’s episode especially if you’re looking at a phone system for your company in the near future because today we’re gonna be talking about how to integrate more technology into your phone system to make all of your users happier and to make you happier as the person managing that phone system.
So today on the program, we have a gentleman name Sangar Safi. And he’s a sales engineer for company called Jive. And if you’re not familiar with Jive, there are great hosted VoIP company that does a lot when it comes to VoIP. So Sangar has sat in a lot of customer appointments and seen a lot of customer applications and he really knows what you can and cannot integrate with a phone system. And in particular, he’s gonna be walking us through a story where a customer did not realize how many different things they could roll into the phone system in terms of integration and how once they did that, it really made everybody’s life easier because it really made all these technologies work together. And I know that’s what everyone is trying to do out there, all of your IT professionals via phone system, you really do want that world where you could integrate stuff in with the phone system and it works smoothly because your users really like that and that’s what they really want from this phone system.
So today is your episode. We’re gonna talk about some really cool stuff when it comes to that. And Sangar is gonna walk us through a really great story.
Okay. But before we get to Sangar, a couple quick reminders. Number one, make sure you take a look at the transcripts of this episode on our website. Go to Aerocominc.com, go to the Blog section, and then search for this episode and you will find the full transcript of this episode. So that if you’re driving or working out, or doing some yard work right now, you don’t have to worry about taking notes because there’s a record of everything we said on this episode on our website. So make sure you take advantage of that, that’s a free resource that we pay to have done just for you.


Secondly, if you’re looking out of phone system – this is what we talked about before. Not only this is a great episode from Sangar but I decided to start doing a webinar on this very topic. So I know you’re trying to make everybody happy if you’re buying this phone system. You’re trying to please your users, you’re trying to please your boss, make sure–make sure the pricing is right, you’re trying to please the people calling into your company so that they have a good a good experience. So you’re trying to please all these different parties and make all of them happy.
How do you do that? Well, I know how you do that. It’s four cornerstones that you have to make sure that you cover. If you cover these four things, you’re gonna get a great phone system that makes everyone happy and those four things are you gotta get the features right, you gotta get the voice quality right, you’ve gotta get the pricing right, and you’ve gotta get the provider right. And I tell you how to get all four of those things right on this webinar. So I’m gonna be doing this webinar. It’s absolutely free. So make sure you sign up and reserve your spot. How do you do that? You text the word VoIPwebinar to the number 44222 and we will send you the information you need to figure out how you sign up for this upcoming free webinar that I’m doing. Again, text the word VoIPwebinar to the number 44222 and we will text you back with the information you need to reserve your spot in this free webinar that I’m doing called The Four Cornerstones of Buying a Business Phone System That Everyone is Going to Love. So make sure you take advantage of that.
And with that said, let’s get to it. Here is Sangar.
Hey, Sangar, welcome to the program. Thanks for joining us.
Sangar: Thank you for having me, Mike.
Mike: Great. Well, tell us a little bit about yourself personally and professionally.
Sangar: Well, my name is Sangar Safi. I’m in the telecom industry for the last 17 years. This is actually my–my current job is my second company I’ve been with. So as you could see I’m pretty loyal employee.
Mike: Yeah.
Sangar: Currently I have no hobbies. The reason is because I cannot make up my mind on what I wanna do. I’ve tried many things and failed at many of them. A little about my personal life, I’m married with four boys so I have to–I have five different personalities to understand and work with aside from working at a telecom company.
Mike: So what are those? What are the five different personalities?
Sangar: Well, five different–five–four boys.
Mike: Oh, I get it.
Sangar: Four boys and my wife, so, you know, four boys, they range from 6 all the way to 15 so as you could see, I’m experiencing all ages or all personalities at the same time. I was born in Afghanistan, lived most of my life as a refugee in Pakistan, been here in United States for about 25 years, moved into Southern California and haven’t left Southern California. Believe it or not, I was studying to be a doctor. As you can see, you know, in Asian culture, you know, eldest son must become a doctor but somehow technology slapped me across the face and said, “Hey, get over here.” And here I am.
Mike: That’s awesome. Well, you and I have a couple things in common. Number one, we both have four kids. My oldest is 12. My youngest is 5. So I’m pretty close to you there. But I have three girls and one boy so pretty–I can–I can definitely relate to you on the multi-personality thing. I happen to deal with everybody’s personalities and try to do a good job absorbing what kind of personality is talking to at the moment and trying to adapt at that point, you know, but yeah, that–and then I also thought I was gonna be a doctor in my whole life until I got to college and I took my first college science class and at that point, it slapped me in the face that I do not like science that much. It was not that interesting to me and I kinda had a realization that the reason I wanted to be a doctor my whole life is because I thought they made a lot of money and that’s what I wanted to do because my parents would drive me up in the hills and say, “Hey, that’s doctor so and so’s house. That’s doctor so and so’s house.” So I immediately as a child went, “Oh, that’s what I wanna do. I wanna be a doctor so I can make a lot of money and be a big shot.” But then when I got to college, like, you know, I think I’ll just major in business to try to make money and to not do something that isn’t really my thing. So I can relate to you there too.
Sangar: Hey, it sounds like you’re doing really well so, you know, you made the right choice.
Mike: Hopefully. Hopefully. I don’t know. The store is not over yet but we’re keeping our fingers crossed. But yeah, we’ll, you know, thanks for joining us again. Thanks for the awesome intro. I mean, I think we could probably talk for about 15, 20 minutes at least on all the things you mentioned there but that’s some really cool stuff. So I think you’re a well-diversified person to have on the program and I appreciate you taking the time to join us.
Sangar: Thanks to you, Mike.
Mike: So everybody–Sangar and I were talking before we started the program on different topics that he could discuss. There’s definitely a lot of different things he’s experienced working with Jive. And one of the things that kinda popped out, he was telling me about a customer story that I thought was really interesting. And so what I wanted him to do today is share that story with us and kinda walk us through what happened with that customer obviously leaving out their name and all that good stuff so we don’t violate any rules here but yeah, just kinda walking us through that story and telling us what the takeaways were for both their company and all the IT managers and IT professionals listening on the line. So, with that point, Sangar, I’ll just kinda turn it over to you and also can you tell us a little bit about what you do for Jive on a daily basis? I think that will kinda be a good intro to the story.
Sangar: Well, my primary role at Jive is a sales engineer. But over the past six months, my role has evolved where I’m involved more on day-to-day engineering at this local field engineering level. I am a sales engineer. I consider myself to be a sales engineer, a deployment engineer and a post install engineer. And at times to be honest with you, a psychiatrist to my AM so I have–I have quite a few jobs. But my primary role as a sales engineer providing a solution, a complete solution to my clients when I go in front of them or even if they have selected us as a vendor to provide the service.
Mike: Fantastic. So then kind of kindly give us an intro of this–of this customer scenario that or customer experience–customer story, I should say that happened kind of just kinda walk us through it?
Sangar: Sure, no problem. When you approach me, Mike and you kinda give me, you know, the outline of what I need to do for this podcast is come up with a topic. You know, what am I gonna talk about? Well, there’s nothing better for me to talk about than my recent experience and I’ve actually come across this many, many times but never really focused and paid attention to it as I should have.
Recently, we won a small customer, you know, very small customer size-wise but, you know, every customer is an important customer to us. It doesn’t matter by the size or the organization. This customer is in the business of providing–they’re in education. They’re an education sector, small charter schools. When they approached us, they wanted a hosted VoIP solution. We went in, we presented, we demo the product, showed them exactly how Jive platform and the product itself works, ¬¬¬very impressed with us. As we were discussing some of the items, they were looking at other items that they wanted to deploy as well. It was a brand new location, multiple buildings, small buildings but they wanted to deploy other technologies as well.
But they were looking to have all those technologies somehow seeing this work together. They were talking to different vendors, you know, as hosted VoIP being one of them. The other vendors were providing a bell system and IP clock system, a display and paging and things like that. As we looked at their overall project, you know, we recommended to them that, you know, instead of going out and trying to work with different vendors and putting everybody in touch with each other to have the solution deployed, why not look at an in an option where a vendor can provide that solution to you, via paging, overhead paging, the Bell system, switching mechanism and things like that? Wrap everything into one and we would work directly with them and integrate and provide that solution to you as an entire package.
Our core business is providing hosted VoIP, you know, but looking at–putting myself in a customer shoes, this was an opportunity for me to ensure that he was satisfied and at the end of the day, his expectations were met. And also we didn’t want him to go to the stress level of school being open and things like that and now he has to worry about all this other elements.
So we went out. We had a couple of partners, we reached out to couple of our partners. We kinda put a call together with the customer, put an entire package together with a bell system, IP speakers, cabling, you know, trenching, everything that they need. We went ahead and we did that entire process for them. Once we presented, we were able to deploy everything on time for this customer and they were able to, you know, have a smooth transition to a brand new year opening the school, a brand new school, and they were able to focus on their core business instead of worrying about if their bell system is gonna work, if the–if the speaker system is gonna work if they have an emergency and their VoIP system at that point.
You know, looking at that I kinda came up with the, you know, in my own mind was an idea, you know, why can’t a service provider such as Jive be a one-stop shop? You know, instead of customer going out, going out and figuring out 10 different products that they wanna integrate with each other, why not go out to a provider such as us and provide them a complete solution where everything will be proven, everything will be tested and verified and confirmed before it’s even deployed. And we were able to accomplish this at this point with this customer.
Now the one takeaway I got from this is as an IT manager or a client, you don’t have to necessarily go out and find these a la carte pieces and trying to put them altogether, you know, through integration and things like that because integration itself can be a very long, winding road that most IT managers do not wanna go. There are vendor–there are vendors service providers that can provide you in a complete solution, although they may not be the direct provider but they definitely work with other partners who can do that for them which removes a lot of the stress, the headache and at the end, they’re getting the products that they’re expecting to deliver to their clients at this case–in this case, it was the–it was the teachers and the administration of the school and they wanted to make sure that they have the products that they can serve to their organization.
Mike: Yeah, that makes sense. So if you break that down like so what exactly so they had a bell system there at their school?
Sangar: They actually–they didn’t have anything so this building that we walked into was believe it or not, about four, five different homes, you know, on a lock and they turned them into charter school.
Mike: Got it.
Sangar: What they did is they wanted to connect all the buildings via fiber. You know, when they came to us and, you know, so we went into the site survey, and try to understand how they’re gonna connect all the buildings. They wanna do trenching but they’re weren’t sure how they were gonna–who were they gonna hire, you know, the timeline and things like that. They were in a very short timeline. So we were able to go and provide them a company that did the trenching for them, ran the fiber cables, did the entire job for them.
They reached out to us once we kinda, you know, pointed the items that they would need and they already had identified those but they weren’t sure how everything was gonna work. We put them in contact with a partner that provided them a bell commander system which is a school bell system and also IP speakers.
Now at the end, we wanted to get the hosted VoIP solution tied into their bell system and also their IP speaker system. Well, we were able to do that from our platform and our perspective of how our system is designed. So this other partner came in, they installed the equipment, all the speakers. They installed the bell commander, they configured it, they tested it against our system, we tested our system against theirs, everything was seamless. School started on a Monday and everything worked like they had been in business for 10 years.
Mike: Wow! And so like is that–was that a function of–I mean, did you guys know those vendors ahead of time or is it something, you know, because I’m just thinking, “Okay. This were third-party vendors who came in and installed their stuff but how, you know, do you guys have the stuff kind of on file like different vendors that you use for these different types of things that you know will definitely integrate with your system” because I’m assuming that there’s third-party vendors out there who with their product does not integrate very well with your system. How does the–how does the customer find these vendors that will integrate with a specific provider’s system?
Sangar: Well, there are two ways, you know, the first of the obvious ways a manufacture or vendor of a product will reach out to us, we would take the product certified on our platform. Then we go out to our partners, our partner community and we have certified this partner. We have already–they have gone to a rigorous process with us to ensure that they can deliver the same level service that Jive provides. We’ll go and talk to these partners, these partners are, in some cases, are ready working these vendors or if they’re not, we recommend to them that, “Hey, we’re looking into this product. You may wanna put this on your portfolio.” They go ahead and they certify their staff. They get the product online, you know, they certify the product on their side to ensure that their technicians and engineers how to deploy that specific product.
We have already done it on our side and all we have to do is put the two companies together, the partner in Jive together and test and verify to make sure that the product itself will deliver as promised to the customer. So we do have these relationships build ahead of time but there are times where, you know, a partner would come to us and say, “Hey, we’re seeing a little bit more of this specific product. Maybe you guys wanna put it on your portfolio or certify or confirm it on your platform that it’s gonna work the way it needs to work.” So it could work vice versa, you know, they come to us and we go to them. We build the relationship. We have partners throughout the country that provide the specific type of services for us. And at the end of the day, you know, we are bringing business to our partners. There’s nothing in it for us but the only thing that we get out of the whole relationship is a satisfied customer and I think that is the most important thing.
Mike: Right, that’s great. So those, you know, in this particular, you know, instance with the school you guys already had partners teed up that knew how to do bell systems and all that?
Sangar: Yes.
Mike: You know, like the bell system and obviously I mean, the fiber trenching that I could see is, you know, having, you know, that come up multiple times but that’s pretty interesting that you guys have had that scenario come up in the past where you had somebody that could come in and provide a bell system for them that you knew ahead of time would integrate with your system and you had that relationship already built prior to working with that customer.
Sangar: Yes, exactly. I mean, like I said working with the specific partner, we were able to, you know, we were able to deliver on not certainly where we promised but at least what we recommended to the customer, you know, our recommendation, our word at that point was the most important thing. By putting that partner in front of the customer, we were able to accomplish that. Now, the partner itself–now these products had been rigorously certified and confirmed on our platform itself. So it’s not something that we just slap on and make sure that, you know, it does the bare minimum. We wanna make sure that it does what it needs to do.
Now the customer in this case was looking at IP speakers, they were looking at couple of different manufacturers. They were also looking at the bell system as well. So they were looking at couple of different system. We were able to put an entire, a complete package together for them through our partner.
Mike: Yeah, that’s great. Because like you said, I can see where people are looking or trying to find the stuff on their own but, you know, whether or not those would be–those would be able to integrate with your system would be the–would be the issue, right? Or like fully integrated with your system and work while it’d be like they’re kind of, you know, recreating the wheel so to speak as opposed to going to you guys and having you guys use vendors who’ve been–who’ve been tested already and that if, you know, been certified as something that works with the system and you guys have done it before so you can troubleshoot it easier, just seems much easier obviously to use a vendor that you guys have already aligned with.
Sangar: Yeah, that’s correct. I mean, it makes the process extremely seamless as far as the deployment goes and any kind of troubleshooting down the road as well because the partner is–they understand our platform at that point too. They are our partner. They are also a customer at times too. So they know exactly how our system works. They can go against it and try to test it and troubleshoot it and prove the concept before they deploy to the customer site.
Mike: That’s interesting. So, what I’m kinda taking away from this is if you’re looking to purchase a hosted VoIP system, to kinda look at this as more of a holistic, you know, purchase where you’re thinking, “Okay. Not just kind of compartmentalized into a phone system and saying, ‘Hey, we’re looking for a new phone system’ but what else should be integrated with it or what else needs to be integrated with it or what else could be integrated with it.” And then maybe take that as, you know, one of the first questions when you’re interviewing potential VoIP companies is saying like, “Hey, do you have solutions that could help us with, you know, integrating our overhead paging system” or this or that or, you know, all the different types of things they wanna throw in in the mix, you know, kinda asking providers upfront like in the first meeting to try to find the provider like Jive who has some of these relationships already set up as opposed to just going, “Oh, this is a phone system. Let’s just shop and it’s gonna be the same across all providers” and then finding out later that they don’t really have a good way to integrate with these other things.
Sangar: I agree 100%, you know, with your assessment and your takeaway. I mean, we come across many instances where customer they assumed that everything, you know, a phone–it’s a phone at the end the day and that is the idea, that is their concept. It’s just a phone. It should work with any platform. I mean, we’re in a different age of, you know, phone systems, you know, when we’re talking about VoIP and a hosted VoIP, it’s a totally different animal and you wanna make sure and as an IT manager that, you know, you have everything covered. You don’t wanna put a carriage before a horse, deploy a system and now you’re deploying a VoIP system, a hosted solution and you’re not able to integrate. You know, so those are the–those are the key things. We encourage our clients to ensure that they ask those questions of the provider that they’re going to after, you know, whichever provider they are going after.
Now in many instances if we’re not the winning vendor, we still encourage our customers or our clients, our potential clients to ask those questions. Maybe somebody else can do it much better than we are. And in some instances, we’re a lot better than them. So if those questions are asked, headaches are avoided down the road.
Mike: That’s great. And Sangar, what are some–what are some other, you know, applications that the customers–just what are some other examples that you’ve seen in your experience that pop up on customer appointments, other things businesses can integrate with their phone system that they might not be aware of. What are some other things where you guys have strategic relationships with other vendors that can really integrate with the phone system that the people need to know about?
Sangar: So, you know, we look at the integration part. I mean, the way I dissect integrations, there’s two parts of it, you know, there’s a software, there’s an application that you have and there’s hardware. Majority of the hardware, if they’re–if you have a platform that you’re–as an IT director going to deploy a hosted or for, you know, when they purchase a hosted VoIP solution or anything like that, you wanna make sure that the system itself is–it’s a standard system. You don’t want it to be a proprietary system. I’ll give you the reason for that is, you know, everybody is heading–everybody is heading toward the route of, “Hey, let’s have a standard platform, you know, I should be able to put an IP speaker.” I’m just giving you an example, give you an IP speaker system that I should be able to integrate or configure any platform. It doesn’t have to be tied to a specific system. It’s an investment down the drain if that system doesn’t work three or five years down the road.
Now as far as applications go, one of the thing, you know, there is a misconception of integration, you know, the clients that I run into, you know, they all want to integrate something that they have in their organization into a new platform that comes in. Maybe they have heard the term integration or they think integrating to something maybe a benefit to them. But, you know, they have–we look at it from the perspective of how the integration is gonna benefit them. Is it really worth it? Now if they’re strictly going by a hosted VoIP provider based on integration and there’s no benefit, a long-term benefit or a huge benefit for them to integrate, it’s a waste of–waste of time in my opinion. At the end of the day, it’s a phone system. You want it to be able to perform at minimum what it needs to do. Now any other piece that comes with it from the vendor–from the vendor that’s providing the hosted VoIP solution is a plus. But integration shouldn’t be a must to go after a hosted.
Now all hosted provider are leaning more toward integrating to every kind of CRM platform, you know, you’re talking about Office 365, Google Docs, SalesForce and thing, those are becoming a very standard in the industry right now. But anything specific and you’re gonna base your decision on specific integration to an application that’s maybe propriety to your system, I think it’s not a wise way to evaluate a hosted system.
Mike: So you’re saying if somebody has a proprietary software that they’re running internally not to, you know, not to consider that in terms of integrating that with your phone system or vice versa?
Sangar: No, not basing the decision to go with the hosted solution based on the integration piece. Like I said, you know, to have kinda weigh the benefits of integration. Most vendors will come in and say, “Yeah, we have an open API. We’re able to integrate to whatever platform you have.” You know, there’s one piece to that. What about the piece of the software that you’re trying to integrate with. It may not be as simple as it sounds. If we’re talking apples to apples, perfect. But in most cases, it’s an apple to an orange. So it’s a little bit complicated. And if the decision is based on a simple integration to a system or an application, that’s proprietary to that organization, I think that complexes things very much, you know, in a short term and a long term.
Mike: Yeah, you know, good example there. I mean, we have a hosted VoIP system internally in our office and I won’t name any names in terms of providers. I don’t wanna throw anybody in the bus but we integrated it with–we integrated it with SalesForce. And there was like kind of a bolt on integration that we did and really the benefit there was just to maybe find a way for salespeople to, you know, automatically log calls or something like that but nothing we needed terribly but thought it’d be really kinda just cool if we could do it. We did it, the problem is it caused a glitch in the way all of our contacts were being integrated and basically all of our contacts within Salesforce ended up being duplicated. So I’m like, you know, we had 2, 3, 20 of some contacts and it created a huge mess in our SalesForce because the integration wasn’t that good. And it’s just kinda illustrated the point like you said I mean, really weigh the pros and cons of integrating that, you know, particular software with, you know, with, you know, with your hosted VoIP system in outlook and all that stuff. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s not so good, you know, like I said SalesForce is one that a lot of people have downed a lot better nowadays but I can see your point of saying that, hey, it may not be worth all the headaches of all the little problems that do pop up if you really integrate it back and forth. But that’s kind of the negative side but on the positive side, are there any, you know, like, you know, I would have never thought of integrating school bell system with a phone system but, you know, never thought that a company like a Jive had a vendor already teed up for something like that. Are there any other applications that you’ve seen just to kinda spur some creativity with the people listening? And any other third-party applications that they should kinda consider going to their hosted VoIP providers and asking them, “Hey, is this something that you guys can integrate with?”
Sangar: One of the thing that we have looked into and we have tested few of them are as well are like a message–like a message board, you know, or a clock or things like that, the IP-based clocks that you can integrate into a phone system where you can dial a specific extension, for example, and it performs a specific task for you. You know, so you don’t have to go to your computer or log into that software to do specific things like that.
Now we have some strobe lights, for example, you know, it’s required for security and things like that in hallways and things of that nature. We have integrated those items directly into our platform, you know, you can call a strobe light by an extension or you can create a security button on a phone. As soon as you press it, it pretty much calls all the strobe lights and here you go, lights are on and the horns are going and the siren is on and now you have a security protocol that you in place through your phone system, through your VoIP hosted IP provider.
The other piece that is at the end of the day, I mentioned this before to you. And it’s a phone, you know, it’s a phone system at basic. We want it to be able to receive and make calls. But to the end user–I’ll give you an example of a K-12 vertical or K-12 scenario, you know, I wanna be able to integrate a parent notification system into the phone system. And this should be all tied into one portal where I can send messages and receive messages to parents and I can also check my voicemails, you know, set up my call forwarding and all those mechanisms. So that is the next wave of integration that an organization and this could apply to a retail shop. You know, a retail shop wants to get into their portal and set up some kind of call flow, but they also wanna send a message to 10,000 of their customers at once to say, “Hey, we had a sale is going on next week. Perhaps you wanna come in and look at our sales item and things like that.” So mass notification is becoming a piece word. There’s more demand and more requests, you know, all these institutions they wanna put all these products into one product portfolio rather than working 10 different applications and making the stuff work.
Mike: Right. That makes sense so that everybody doesn’t have, you know, 10 different apps up on their computer. Well, to send, you know, a mass text, you got to log in to this system and it’s different than the phone system and especially when you’re talking about a lot of users who aren’t necessarily technical. That starts to become a challenge.
Sangar: Exactly. I mean, so we do come across that and I think that as a company and I don’t wanna plug–go ahead and plug Jive in but that’s something that we’re looking at it right now as well. This is–this is the next wave of, you know, of how we can communicate with our community to parents and the employees of an organization and students, you know, how can we engage in a real time environment, you know. You know, we’re so tech savvy. We’re always constantly on our smart phones and things like that.
Now phone-hosted VoIP is a great way to for parents to reach the school and things like that, but, you know, you want it to be the other way around as well, where somebody can just send you a message and receive the message on your voice platform and you’re able to reply back to them as well.
Mike: Yeah, that’s great. Well, cool. I think–I think those are some great points. I think that was a cool story to kinda illustrate that and I appreciate you sharing.
Sangar: And you’re welcome, and I greatly appreciate you having me on this. It was a lot of fun for me.
Mike: Well, yeah, before we let you go, I’ve got a couple of more things I want to get to. Number one, as we always do, I want you to share a story with us. You know, tell us, you know, obviously someone who’s been working for companies here in the US for 20 some years, you’ve probably witnessed a couple things. So I love that if you share with us an interesting or funny thing that you’ve witnessed in the workplace.
Sangar: Sure. There’s quite a few stories so I had to pick one and I think this one I hope any–someone can relate to it or maybe not, maybe it’s just me. At my previous life, my previous workplace, you know, being an engineer, you know, I was requested to be on site for a large migration and migration usually takes, you know, usually a migration happens after hours where our customer site, we experience an issue where we couldn’t move forward with the migration. So we decided to roll it back, you know, this is about midnight 1 o’clock. We’re all exhausted, tired. Everybody wants to go home. I go out to my car, put all my stuff in my car, my cell phone, everything, it’s in my bag. I leave it in there. I forgot something that I need to go back and get it. I went ahead and I went back to the server room. You know, my contact let me in, you know, I went inside and somehow my site contact, you know, I’m trying to get out of the building at that point. From the server room, it was one of those two ways key pop type of situation, once you get in, you need a key pop to get out. I got stuck inside the–inside the room. My site contact left and I’m inside the server room and the server room was very well lit. So, you know, I wasn’t scared of any ghost or boogey man or anything like that. So I was like, “Okay.” And there was a phone, I was very happy I found a phone. I can call somebody to let me out. I go in, pick up the receiver, the phone is dead. I’m like, “You know what? There’s nothing I can do. Let’s make the best out of the situation and hopefully somebody finds me in the next day.” The good thing was it was not Friday. I went ahead and I stayed in the room. There was a label maker they had in the server room. In order to pass time, I picked up the labelmaker and started labeling all of their devices, the customer devices with names and ID’s and I went ahead and I re-label some of the cables and things like that. In the morning, the IT guy shows up and opens up the door room, the good thing was he showed up around 7 AM, shows up sitting in a chair, taking a nap, he comes in, he sees his server room extremely organized and clean.
Well the moral of the story is always wear a jacket when you go into server room, you know, and this is for the IT Directors, make sure there’s a phone that’s working in a server room because instances like this could happen and for me, I should–I should have carried a power bar because I hadn’t eaten that day and all the way until 7:00 in the morning, there was not an ounce of food in my body. So, you know, like I said the moral is always wear a jacket. If I didn’t have a jacket, I would have been freezing inside that room. Luckily I did and it all worked out for me at the end of the day.
Mike: Wow, so wait. So were you married at this point? I mean, was your wife wondering where you were?
Sangar: Yes, I was married and, you know, she knew that I was at work. So, you know, knowing that fact she usually doesn’t call me. Thank God! Otherwise, she would have been freaking out. It was quite late as well so I called her right before I left the site to say, “hey,” or that I’m done for the day and I’m heading to my hotel room and I’ll call her tomorrow morning. I did call her tomorrow morning but she didn’t know that I spend the night at the server room.
Mike: Oh, so you already out of, you know, not antenna. I was thinking your wife was expecting you to come home as far as the police went searching for you.
Sangar: No, no. No, nothing like that. I mean, I thought of doing something where the cops would come in but, you know, I didn’t want to be in a situation where here I am and cops are outside and I’m trying to explain to them for I was–what I was doing there and things like that. So I say, “You know what? I’ll just go ahead and pass time, re-label everything, and clean everything for this customer.” He was very, very happy, extremely happy. And I asked him, why he left me behind? He’s reasoning was it’s been–it was a long day for him and he didn’t even think of it. He opened the door and he walked away and went home.
Mike: Oh, man. It’s like–it’s like actually I was, you know, I’m glad you found the clue. I’d love to label maker at 4 AM.
Sangar: Well, the good thing is he had a fresh set of bad reasoning. There were no bad reason that label maker our party, you know, draw myself crazy.
Mike: Oh my gosh. How cool is that for him though that you did that? You picked up that label maker and went to town, you know, like feeding on the–on your, your know, anal organization tendencies for the next few hours. That’s great.
Sangar: Well, that’s the–either I spend the time that way or, you know, bite my nails still I don’t have any. So I decided to re-label everything.
Mike: Yeah, that’s great. Well, cool. That’s a cool story. And I also really like to takeaway for all of you IT professionals out there to, you know, make sure you wear a jacket and bring a power bar and have a phone in there that works.
Sangar: Yup. That’s it, those are the key things. That’s all we need as engineers.
Mike: I love it. I love it. Well, great. Well, thanks for sharing that and tell us a little bit about Jive. You know, obviously Jive is where you work currently but for those who are listening who don’t know who Jive is, you know, tell us a little bit of background in what Jive does really well. If Jive’s up to anything new that we should know about.
Sangar: Sure. So, let me kind of dive into, you know, how I came to Jive. I’ve been at Jive for the past two years. I worked at a major telecom provider for 17 years. And I’m always been an engineer. I never worked with sales directly, coming to Jive, working directly with the salesperson was very, very awkward because I always bash the sales. As an engineer, you’re supposed to bash sales. That’s how it works. But to be honest, once coming to Jive, I really understood that sales is a totally different world. And I have so much more respect for them because it’s a very, very tough job. And they do a good job at it too. So I have a lot of respect for them. I learned a lot from them.
Well, Jive is a hosted VoIP provider. We have our own platform that we build. We’ve been in business for 10 years. We’ve very large and every vertical you can imagine, you know, very big in the K-12 and non-profit higher education vertical right now. California and few other states are the hotbed for our services. We’re currently on a CalNet contract which means in order to get on a CalNet contract, you have to be a miracle worker. We don’t consider ourself miracle worker but, you know, being a good VoIP provider, we were able to get on that CalNet contract.
We’re very customer-oriented organization. The one thing that I love about Jive is how much we care of our customers. Our customer care project management, account manager, and sales engineering is world-class. I’ve seen it firsthand. I worked at a larger organization, I work at Jive and I see a major difference and I think that is the piece that attracted me the most to coming and working for Jive.
Now, few of the items at Jive is working on right now are we’re building some of the applications such as screen sharing, conference bridging, you know, light contact center, pieces like that. We’re building them internally and including them with our package. So it becomes a one–again, a one-stop shop type of mentality. You know, you come to Jive, I will give you everything that you need. You don’t need to go to a third party or when I’m gonna give you a third-party application to get something working for you.
Aside from features, you know, and things like that, we are doing things a little bit different in the last 15 to 18 months. We’ve been very focused on our customer. We wanna make sure we deliver what we need to deliver to our customer. Now if a customer comes to us and that they don’t like a specific process, we’re very open to the ideas of changing our processes, our product LAN, whatever it may be to ensure whatever the customer needs we’re trying to deliver. At the end of the day, you know, every VoIP provider has a ton of features and, you know, I don’t really wanna sell features. I don’t wanna sell features. I wanna sell a solution and I wanna sell a company that can–that will care for that specific customer from the day they signed the deal till the day they leave Jive. And hopefully, that doesn’t happen.
Mike: That’s awesome. Yeah. I think those are some great points. I mean, customer service is huge and these days like we talked about early just trying to adapt to what their needs are and trying to find a solution that will fit their unique needs and trying to kinda wrap your solution around what their needs are. I think that’s a great philosophy.
Sangar: Well, that’s the philosophy that I–that I look at. You know, like I said, I’m a very loyal person when it comes to work and the organization I work for. But there were things that I saw as an industry, we were losing, you know, a customer care, customer support, taking care of the customers who are paying your bill, day-to-day bill, was going away. I’m not bashing anybody but, you know, coming to Jive I saw that and it was very attractive to me and we try to keep that moving forward. You know, our discussion everyday is customer, customer, customer, customer. That’s the only discussion we have.
Mike: That’s great because that is so true. I mean, as providers get really big it’s just nothing against them but it is really hard. I mean, you’re talking about a lot of different departments that are usually, you know, regionalized or nationalized into one spot and trying to have that provider be, you know, really customer-focused, it gets more and more difficult. I’ve definitely seen that with service providers. As they grow, that’s always a big challenge. I bet that is refreshing for you to go to Jive where you’re like, hey they’re able to grow and they’re still maintaining their customer focus which is–which is great.
Sangar: Yeah, exactly. I mean, you know, we are gonna grow because I know we have a world-class product. We have a great product. We know we’re gonna grow but we wanna make sure that the piece that made us grow this far is taking care of that specific customer. And like is I earlier, it does not matter if you’re a five-phone customer to a 10,000 phone customer, in our eyes you’re a customer and we’re supposed to take care of you and we will take care of you.
Mike: Awesome. Thanks for sharing a little bit about Jive with us. You know, like I said not everybody on the line or, you know, I should say who’s listening really knows all this different providers that we’re speaking. Jive is one of them where obviously company that I know is doing a great job but I think that explains a lot to those out there who weren’t familiar with Jive. So I appreciate you taking the time to share that.
Sangar: Yeah. Sure, no problem. And once again, I really want to thank you for giving me this opportunity. You know, I may have stumbled here and there but it was very comfortable. I really enjoyed it. I hope I get a chance to next time to talk about something else.
Mike: Yeah, absolutely. We’ll be–we’ll be back around to tap into some of the other knowledge you have on anything hosted VoIP related because, you know, Jive is getting a lot of good reviews on our website. So we want to keep talking to you guys and figure out all the cool things that you know and help everybody out with it. So hey, have a great day and thanks for coming on, Sangar.
Sangar: You do the same, Mike and goodbye to all of your listeners. Thank you. Take care. Bye-bye.
Mike: Okay. So that’s it everybody. Thank you for joining us once again. And a couple quick reminder so if you like some of the things that Sangar was talking about need to review it in a little bit more detail, don’t forget the transcripts are on our website. Go to Aerocomin.com, go to the blog section and then search for this podcast and you’ll find the full transcript of this podcast on our site. So check that out.
Also number two, the free giveaway. Make sure that you sign up for these upcoming webinars that I’m doing – The Four Cornerstones of Buying a Business VoIP System That Will Make Everyone Happy. All you have to do to get the information on how to reserve your spot is text the word VoIPwebinar to the number 44222.
Okay, everybody! Well, have a great day out there and we will catch you next time.
IT Nation, thank you for joining us on Cloud Therapy with Aerocominc.com. Visit us at Aerocominc.com, that’s A-E-R-O-C-O-M-I-N-C,.com and head on over to the blog section for notes on everything we talk about today as well as our blogs, provider reviews and of course, the best quotes for any technology.

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