Even when it's not our fault, it's still our fault

Posted by: Matt Smith

For thousands of our customers, Aptela's hosted phone system is a powerful asset to their business. The flexibility of our features empowers our customers in ways that a traditional PBX cannot. However, great power also involves great responsibility. When customers take steps to ensure their network is VoIP Ready, it is our job to make sure that their experience is one that is far better than any phone service they had in the past.

Inevitably, there are times when customers notify us of call quality problems. When that occurs, we inspect four points for failures: our network and systems, our underlying carriers, the customer's network and the Customer's ISP. 95% of the time, the root cause of the problem is an issue on the customer's network. Usually, changing a firewall or router setting will clear the problem right up. We've also seen cases where a growing business has added computers and phones to their network, resulting in a lack of bandwidth to handle the additional calls. Helping this type of customer figure out their new bandwidth requirements will usually resolve their issues. Viruses, spyware, amateur networks, WiFi, YouTube and outdated phone firmware are other issues that can cause VoIP phone calls to encounter problems.

When a business takes its first step to a VoIP phone system and encounters one of the above problems, their first inclination is to blame us. This is a natural reaction, and even though the problems are not our fault - we must treat them like they are. Aptela has invested in the tools and the talent to help our customers isolate and resolve these issues, and bring their networks to a a state of VoIP Readiness. We've found there's a direct coorelation between a VoIP-ready network and a happy, productive and powerful Aptela customer!