Frankenstein VoIP

It’s awesome – you have decided to migrate to the cloud and use Cloud Voice, better known as VoIP, and now it’s time to choose a provider…. This is where the decision starts getting tough… You start and do your research on the web…. You found all sorts of cool websites, and all this information… You have no idea as to where to begin and start. The company you call starts telling you their story, and they tell you how they have created their own VoIP solution…. And it begins…. You decide to migrate to their product and when you need something like call routing by time of day and or CRM integration let alone Microsoft Teams integration…. They tell you it is not available, or that this is a feature soon to be released, or that its available only as custom code… or worse yet, the system just does not perform to expectations and seems to have all sorts of BUGS in the code and works some of the time…. You are now a victim of Frankenstein VoIP….

Frankenstein VoIPX, one of my favorite topics, is a company that you run into and they’re all so proud as a homegrown system they created in the cloud their own operating system for VoIP. It could be an entirely built from the ground up or something built on either FreeSWITCH or FreePBX. They are proud of their accomplishment… we built it, so now they shall come…

My own company was a victim of this…. We use to have our own Frankenstein VoIP solution…. And I am very happy we no longer are in this business and we have almost all of our customers from those early days… I have to ask myself, what was I thinking?

These providers, while all well intended typically only have 1-2 core technical people and might have some of their code developed overseas…. They are always in the rears and typically have many issues from their product, not offering real security, requires constant patches and updates, to being buggy and by that I mean, some features work some of the time and there is no explanation as to why, finally they offer no real integration to say Microsoft Teams and your CRM such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, ZOHO, Keap, Active Campaign and over 300 other CRM’s If anything they say they can do this with custom code which will cost you a pretty penny. Even when the custom code is written it is only for their current version as well as the CRM’s current software version.

As a recent real situation, our company was chosen by a client as we use a licensed solution in our core being the Netsapiens platform. This customer required integration to both Microsoft Teams as well as Active Campaign, their CRM tool. They looked at several Frankenstein VoIP providers who all told them it would be complicated and a lot of custom code…. We could do everything out of the box and use our Netsapiens partnerships to create Native Microsoft Teams Integration along with integration to Active Campaign. The reason Netsapiens can do this is they have millions of phones/end points deployed with a multitude of resellers of their platform so companies are willing to create system integrations. These integrations will also stay current with the new software releases, thus never causing you to require any future custom coding.

Why we switched is we no longer wanted to be in the software business with constant break/fix issues in the code. We wanted a reliable safe platform for our customers. A platform which has many third party integrations allowing for CRM, Microsoft Teams, Call Recording, and many other current and new feature requirements to enhance our end users experience and productivity.

Stay tuned for a future article, we will have a “Do-It-Yourself-Guide-to-Choosing-a-VoIP-Partner”

Until then, this has been “Telecom Bob” in the good fight to “Eliminate Telecom Hell”.

Open One Solutions, Inc. is a Chicago based Business VoIP Provider specializing in both cloud / hosted and premised based IP phone systems or IP-PBX solutions. Open One Solutions brings years of experience in this field. Our company founder has been using and deploying cloud / hosted VoIP since 2004 and deploying IP-PBX solutions since the 90’s. For additional information contact us at 312-780-1010 or send us an email at info@openonesolutions.com

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