Keeping Telecom Going During Shortages

Supply chain problems and systemic shortages continue to impact multiple industries, and the telecommunications industry is not exempt. In fact, it often telecom harder.

Customers are often willing to wait for the new vehicle they ordered, or make do for a bit without features that require a computer chip on backorder.  Business phone systems, however, are not optional and they can’t miss out on important capabilities or features.

Stir in the rise of remote/hybrid workplaces and the concomitant need for flexible VoIP phone systems, and our challenges become clear.  The question is can we be flexible and creative in solving those challenges.

What Happened?

The telecom industry in general is forever running to keep ahead of the curve.  Increasing numbers of consumers with more devices per person and escalating demands on bandwidth combine to make that curve fairly steep.  Transitioning from the office to remote work adds to the overall demand.  Due to COVID-19, though, some factories closed and others sharply reduced output. The reduction in the manufacturing industry caused issues all the way up the line and makes meeting demand even more challenging.

In addition, due to that reduction in equipment and uptick in inflation, equipment prices skyrocketed.  Solving these issues calls for creative solutions and unconventional thinking.

Our Plan To Keep You Going

To keep clients competitive in their communications, NoContractVoIP decided on a combination of strategies:

• Source and stockpile necessary equipment components (i.e., IP phones, SD-WAN appliances, PoE data switches, analog telephone adapters (ATA), home office power/WiFi adapters, etc.)
• Offer effective options for key components (i.e., softphones vs. physical IP phones, eFax vs. fax machines, etc.)
• Consult with clients to customize their systems for efficiency
• Imagine and project for issues not yet on the radar

Here’s how NoContractVoIP goes about this plan.

Source and Stockpile Critical Components

With our four decades of business telecom experience, we know what physical components our clients cannot function without. We source only from reliable companies who have implemented their own foresight and solutions, and we stockpiled our supplies while they were on the market. We have dealer agreements with our suppliers, ensuring that we can keep our equipment in stock, and we have enough on hand to cover periods of backorders.

Find And Verify Substitutes

In many cases, there are multiple ways to get to the same objective.  If a hardware solution isn’t available, often a software solution will work just fine for a while.

If our desk phone units were unavailable, we can set up customers with softphones that work on multiple devices and mobile phone clients. Employees can use softphones from their workstations with a headset, or even through cell phones.  These softphones offer many of the same capabilities as desk phones. Autoattendants, voicemail to email, transfers, and conference calling all work the same. If the softphone app needs to go on an employee’s private cell phone, the business number still works with the softphone app and the employee’s private number never has to come into play.

If difficult to source hardware becomes necessary, refurbished equipment offers a viable solution to keep a business going.  While these refurbished pieces may not have the bleeding edge latest greatest features, they reliably keep communications flowing until the latest greatest comes along at an acceptable price point.

Substitution ability represents the largest reason we pushed to have our eFax solution certified to handle HIPPA sensitive data.  We meet the standards for protecting medical privacy with our programming, rendering physical fax machines unnecessary.

Many of these options represent significant cost savings for companies.  Softphones, for instance, often cost less than half of a physical desk phone.

One piece of good news on the horizon is that Internet service providers took the demand hint and leapfrogged their bandwidth capabilities.  At one point, businesses paid dearly to get dedicated employee circuits.  Now, consumer Internet runs well enough for remote offices in employee homes to work well.

Consult For Efficiency With Clients

One of the issues we see ongoing with the bundles or packages often offered by other VoIP providers is that clients wind up forced to buy capabilities they don’t need.  If a business client of ours utilizes a majority of remote workers, they don’t need a lot of in office capability.  We don’t make them purchase any of that when they don’t need it.

If, on the other hand, they utilize a majority of in office workers, we can customize solutions based on location and minimize the remote worker infrastructure.

We understand that some people who call us just want a ballpark idea of the costs and get frustrated when we say we have to give a detailed quote.  However, we really can’t get around that because of what exactly we do.  We don’t have packages, we don’t have contracts, we work with each individual client to get them exactly what they need, no more, no less.  We know the dizzying array of what’s available, and work to suit each solution to each client.

For instance, one client might need eight table teleconferencing phones, which tend to be quite expensive. Another might need wireless handsets to be able to go around a warehouse.  Yet another might have a lot of employees that just sit in one room at a desk.  Each of these solutions need to be tailored to the business in question, and those costs vary wildly.

We stay flexible, scalable, and take the time to find the perfect tech solution for each business we serve.  This gives us powerful advantages in options when it comes to solving problems with the supply-chain crisis.

Imagine And Project For The Unpredictable Future

Successful businesses take the time to design and implement an overall business continuity plan to keep going during unforeseeable problems.

For instance, one of the complimentary features we have long offered our clients is the ability to have their business phone system forwarded to another phone of their choice if the building is inaccessible for some reason.

With 2025 set as the sunset date in the United States for traditional copper telephone lines, we prioritized investigating how elevator and alarm systems phone lines will be provisioned going forward. We also work to keep redundant backups in our own systems so that a disaster with one of our data servers doesn’t impact our clients at all.

Every business phone system provider should work with their clients to ensure the client’s business communication abilities get preserved in as many circumstances as possible. Hopefully, those backups never become necessary, but they need to be in place. To act otherwise is both irresponsible and unacceptable.

Ready For A Top Notch VoIP Business System?

Here at NoContractVoIP, we create custom business phone systems that offer a full suite of hybrid and remote solutions for your telecom needs. Your success is our success.

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Looking for the finest stress-free custom business telephone systems? Contact us or call today at 866-550-0005!

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