ISPs for Retail Companies

July 3, 2020 Mike Smith

If you’re in charge of IT for a medium or large-size retail company, you know that managing the Internet connectivity isn’t easy.

Your company probably has multiple ISP‘s and multiple account numbers, which you’re having to manage across all sites. Maybe even as many as 50+ different accounts!

Paying bills, catching billing errors, chasing trouble tickets, calling-in to customer service… those tasks are complicated with that many accounts.

In this video, Mike Smith tells you the best ISPs to use (for your retail sites), to minimize these issues.

Want Mike’s recommendation on the best ISP aggregator for your company? Click below!

 

About Mikemikesmith
Mike Smith is the Founder and President of AeroCom and has been helping companies with telecom and cloud services since 1999. He has been the recipient of numerous business telecommunications industry awards and in 2011, he was honored as one of the top 40 business people in Orange County, CA., under 40 years old. You can also hear him as the host of the popular Information Technology podcast, ITsmiths with Mike Smith. Follow Mike on LinkedInTwitter or SpiceWorks.

 

Transcript

So, your company is a large retail organization and you have sites all over the place. Maybe you have them all over the United States, or all over the state, or all over the world globally. Well, if you’re the IT department for a company like that, or maybe in charge of operations, I don’t have to tell you that one of the most difficult things about that is that you’re managing different ISP internet connections all over the place.

So depending on where the site is, that’s a different ISP that’s available. So you’re getting all these different bills, all of these different account numbers from all these different ISP, and there’s billing errors, taking place, there’s outages and trouble tickets taking place. It’s very hard to manage. And especially if you start getting into SD-WAN, and having multiple ISP at each location, that’s a double or triple the amount of problems that you’re having.

Well, the solution to that, that I always recommend to our customers, is to use an ISP aggregator. So what that’s going to do, it’s going to help you in a lot of different ways. Let me explain.

Number one. So that ISP aggregator is going to be able to sell you any service provider at any site yet give you one bill and one customer service point of contact. So no matter which ISP is available, or multiplies piece, whether it’s 4G, or cable broadband, or dedicated internet, or fixed wireless, you can go to that ISP aggregator. They can quote it for you. They can tell you what’s available. You can purchase it from them. It’s under your main account number. And it’s all on the same day.

In addition, along with everything being through one company, those aggregators also have really slick web portals. So through their web portal, you can see all of your information in one window. So you can see all of the trouble tickets that are open. You can see status for all available circuits. You can drill down per ISP. So if you have an ISP that’s got an outage, you can find all locations who have that ISP and send them a message.

ISPs for Retail Organizations

You can see all kinds of cool stuff through that web portal. So again, things that will really help your efficiency, the web portal, and also the billing consolidation are right up at the very top.

And lastly, the advantage of using an ISP aggregator is just catching billing errors. If you have, 50, 1000, ISP connections, 1000 ISP connections, I guarantee you, there are billing errors taking place all the time. And these ISP aggregators can not only take over your billing for your ISP, they also start doing it for your cellular wireless bills, things like that.

So they can automatically check all these bills all the time and become kind of like a telecom expense management software for you, so that you weren’t having to thumb through bills to make sure that your promotional plan expired, and now you’re being double charged for that broadband connection in your Connecticut site. Things like that happen all the time. And if you’re not working with an aggregator, I guarantee you, you’re probably paying 50% too much on your bill just because of billing errors.

So overall, if you’re a retail organization with a lot of sites, using an ISP aggregator to manage all the ISP connections, or to purchase your ISP connections is definitely the way to go. And don’t worry, if you’re in agreements right now with some of them, what they can do is they can start working with just your sites that are out of contract, or month-to-month, and then slowly pick up all the other sites as they run out of contract.

And sometimes, they can even take over that account without doing a new installation. So they basically just take over the billing for that account. So that’s possible too without any installation. So it’s pain free.

The question is, which aggregator should your company go with? There’s hundreds of them out there.

Well, if you have that question, don’t try to google it all day long and figure it out. Just call (714-593-0011), or email me. I’m a broker for all the major ISP aggregators. And based on your company’s requirements, whether you’re global, what type of connections you need, things like that, I’ll pair you up with the best three to five aggregators that I’d recommend that you quote for your company. I’ll introduce you to the right people at those businesses and make sure that you’re in touch with honest, good, hardworking people that can give you great quotes.

And don’t worry. It won’t cost you a dime. Those companies actually pay our company a broker fee, and you, the customer, don’t have to pay us. So you can come to us, we can give you great recommendations. If you find what you like, you buy directly from that aggregator.

If you have any questions, which I know you probably do, don’t hesitate. Reach out, call me, send me an email. I’m happy to help. I hope that video was a little bit informative. And if you have any other questions, let me know. Have a great day.

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