What to know before choosing a VoIP provider

Voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP) is replacing traditional calling in South Africa, but there are various aspects to consider before deciding on a provider.

MyBroadband spoke to Shannon Swanepoel, managing director at Switch Telecom, and Warren Hawkins, managing director at Euphoria Telecom, about the most important decisions to make when signing up for a VoIP product.

“Reliability, call quality, pricing, and functionality are all very important, but one of the biggest aspects that is often overlooked is fraud prevention,” said Swanepoel.

She explained that South Africa has become a significant target for international syndicates, making it essential that VoIP providers implement robust anti-fraud measures.

To this end, Switch Telecom implemented per-country barring on all VoIP services.

“Clients can restrict international calls to specific countries. The feature also allows clients to set up restrictions based on time of day, preventing unauthorised international calls from being made outside of normal business hours,” said Swanepoel.

Other security measures like biometric verification for online signups and multi-factor authentication can also help protect businesses.

Swanepoel added that checking reviews across various platforms is important before deciding on a provider.

“Read reviews on Facebook, HelloPeter, Google, and the MyBroadband forums,” she said.

“Ask for industry-specific client references that you can speak to, this way, you can gain an insight into what you can and cannot expect from the VoIP provider when you’ve ported onto their network.”

Euphoria Telecom’s Hawkins that customers should consider service, availability, functionality, and flexibility when looking for a VoIP provider for their business.

“Outages impact your business, so ensure your provider has given you a documented, enforceable SLA [service licence agreement] that outlines the uptime you can expect as well as response times to queries, amendments to your service and outages,” he said.

“Ensure that your provider’s solution can give you the most important things you need in a cloud-based PBX before you sign up.”

“Flexibility to scale up and down as your business changes is also critical, you don’t want to get tied into a specific solution set that doesn’t change as fast and as often as you need it to,” Hawkins added.

He also listed several areas of consideration, which are specific to individual business needs, including:

• What volume of calls are you likely to receive?
• Do you need to send specific types of calls (for example, sales or support calls) to different queues?
• Do you make a lot of international calls?
• Do you make many outbound calls?
• Does your team work in one central location, remotely or a mixture?
• Do you need a virtual conferencing solution?
• What collaboration tools are required? Does telephony need to integrate with your productivity software, for instance?
• Do you need to forward calls to mobile phones and make outgoing mobile calls through your telephone system?
• Do you need your telephony system to integrate with a line of business applications like your CRM application?

Lastly, Hawkins said it is also important to consider the pricing and contracts offered by different VoIP providers, adding that they should be very clear on what every aspect of the product is going to cost.

“The different elements of a typical VoIP cloud-based PBX include service charges, extension charges, and call charges. The service charge is the basic fee the provider charges to get that call service,” he said.

“Providers charge different rates for different types of extensions — largely based on the level of functionality each provides. Per minute or per second call charges vary too.”