3 Tips for Shopping Hosted VoIP in Orange County

If your company has one or more locations in Orange County, CA. and has a phone system that is end of life or just out-dated, you are probably considering looking into the option of going to a hosted PBX. The good news is that regardless or whether you are as far north as Brea, as central as Anaheim or in the epicenter of Irvine, you will have basically the same, enormous amount of hosted VoIP service providers to choose from and some of the best pricing in the country. Although that is a wonderful problem to have, tons of options can quickly create an exhaustive evaluation process. Especially if your company has a lot of employees and therefore, has a heightened risk associated with making the wrong decision. Not to fear!

• Benefit from an Agent for Free

There are over 100 hosted phone system providers that can service Orange County and you definitely don’t want to close your eyes and point to a few random providers to start with. Get help! There are lots of good agencies in Orange County (ours included), and there is no reason not to do so. This is like the difference between buying a car through the fleet department vs. walking onto the lot. An agent is free to the client and will typically get you better pricing on the hosted PBX provider of your choice and most importantly, will cut countless hours off your shopping process. When you call a hosted phone system provider directly, you usually aren’t calling the best-fit, you end up with several apples & oranges quotes and you are getting a salesperson who is trying to maximize their one-time commission by offering you as high of a price as possible. Agencies are the way many businesses are purchasing services today and this trend is gaining ground quickly because of it’s obvious advantages to the buyer.

A good agent will also help you determine which hosted VoIP access types you might want to consider using at each site (see next tip), such as EoC, T1, DSL, Fixed Wireless, Cable or Fiber. For instance, hosted VoIP works fine over fixed wireless but many other areas in the US don’t have the advantage of having hosted PBX providers available that offer fixed wireless access. Orange County has many large flat areas, such as Irvine, Orange, Santa Ana, Anaheim, Newport Beach, etc. and therefore, fixed wireless (which has to be line-of-site), should be something you consider to drive down costs.

• Guarantee Your Voice Quality with a Managed Circuit

Don’t consider any provider that does not offer a dedicated (managed), access circuit (like a T1, Fiber or Ethernet over Copper line), with their hosted PBX platform. Orange County has tons of good quality hosted PBX providers so there is no need to settle on one that doesn’t deliver the service properly. The bring-your-own-bandwidth carriers are cheap but you will not get guaranteed voice quality, no matter how large your Internet connection is. Packet Loss and Jitter will affect your voice quality on any Internet connection, regardless of bandwidth. Having perfect voice quality 100% of the time may not sound ultra-important until a call with an important client drops two times in a row, every day, with nearly every employee. Let’s just say it’s a lesson you don’t want to learn the hard way.

• Know Your Features

Dove-tailing off number one, a good agent should be able to listen to your needs and provide you with a list of the latest and greatest features that some providers offer, such as real-time call reporting, unified messaging, find-me-follow-me, mobile integration, salesforce integration, etc. Not every VoIP provider offers every feature but like I said, Orange County has nearly every conceivable hosted PBX provider option available, so there are at least a handful of provider that will fit your exact needs in terms of feature/functionality requirements. For example, if you don’t need a full feature-set on every phone, you shouldn’t pay full price for every user!

Those 3 tips are just the tip of the iceberg but at least that gives you a good start. Good luck shopping and please call us for more free information. Our hosted PBX experts will quickly help you get anything and everything you need to make an intelligent decision, at no charge to you. We have been selling every major hosted phone system provider in Orange County for more than 8 years and know the landscape like the back of our hand!