This cautionary tale illustrates why you should never take a vendor's sales rep at their word when it comes to "how easy migrations are" during the decision-making process. And it may sound familiar because we hear it every day from tech companies—just click a few buttons, perform a few steps, and everything will be perfect.
Then they usually spend the next few weeks on help forums or overseas support trying to figure out what went wrong.
Which is how it went for one of our business acquaintances when they recently decided it was time to step up to a modern cloud contact center. This business was a technology company with less than 100 employees and two different contact center environments. They were migrating from a well-known legacy platform to a popular modern cloud provider, with the promise that self-migration would be super simple and easy.
In this instance, a cloud specialist from the legacy PBX provider facilitated the transition to the modern contact center, which may give away the two vendors we're dealing with here. The client was growing concerned that specific questions weren't being answered by phone or email, such as porting phone numbers on the weekend.
Anyone within the communications industry knows that phone lines can't be ported outside standard business hours. Yet somehow, the legacy PBX sales rep didn't understand this, and he was relaying information through the gaining vendor's overseas tech support team. It is possible that assumptions were made or a language barrier was involved, but it was clear that communication broke down. Promises made about simple implementation could not be fulfilled.
As you can imagine, the customer was furious. He had signed a multi-year contract under false assumptions and porting their numbers during regular business hours could lead to tens of thousands of dollars in lost revenue. There are other workarounds, of course, but nobody involved with the sales process had the technical expertise to reassure the client or provide guidance.
Even worse, overseas support was slow to reply and not looking at this problem from a customer service perspective. Instead of offering viable solutions, they said that their porting team was closed on weekends. There was a brief explanation about temporary numbers, but by then, the customer felt trust was broken, and he responded as anyone would in this situation.
The moral of this cautionary tale is that sales representatives will promise the world and then pass your account along to the next person in line without ever giving it a second thought. It's not that they're trying to be deceptive or dishonest; they're simply disconnected from the technical side of the business and do not fully understand the struggles customers face when working through a migration.
At Converged Technology Professionals, we have a "sales team" that will help you evaluate unified communications and contact center products. The major difference is that we include technical experts in every step of our process, so you get honest answers and real strategies around your path forward.
While it may seem like a minor difference from traditional sales roles, it helps you avoid thousands of potential pitfalls that the average business leader would never see coming.
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