In enterprise telecommunications, we don’t have the luxury of blind faith in our products and services. You need to ask the right questions to make sure you’re getting the best provider for your business needs so you can scale and innovate without constraint.
Even the savviest of IT professionals can get bogged down in the details of each supplier to the point where it becomes difficult to distinguish the good from the bad.
So what questions should you arm yourself with when looking for the ideal communications partner?
Ask these five questions when evaluating SIP providers to make the best business decision for your communications.
1. What services do you offer?
Before you begin having any conversations, make sure you’ve clearly identified what you require for your business. If all you need is SMS/MMS services or PSTN access in limited markets, then your pool of available partners is fairly large. But, if you want texting and virtual toll-free numbers in emerging markets, your choice of providers is more likely to be limited.
Instead, you’re likely to benefit from partnering with a single Communications as a Service (CaaS) partner who can meet your global needs instead of using different vendors within individual markets. Evaluate not just what the provider offers today, but their roadmap for the future.
2. What is your policy on regulatory compliance?
Your SIP trunking provider should help you navigate global emergency regulations, keep you informed of upcoming deadlines, and work with you to ensure your employees and users are prepared in the case of an emergency call.
Look for a provider that can support regulations like Dynamic Location Routing (DLR), RAY BAUM’s Act, Kari’s Law, and more. Unfortunately, many SIP providers don’t natively provide these capabilities and must instead work with a variety of partners to integrate and deliver a broad service offering. Over time, noncompliance can create unsafe working environments and incur costly fines down the road.
3. How reliable are you?
Providers should be able to deliver highly reliable services across their entire operating areas with rapid failover times. They should deliver monitoring and reporting capabilities that allow customers to see exactly how services are performing, both in real-time and historically.
The standard in 2022 is 99.999% reliability, which means you should only experience six or fewer minutes of downtime each year.
4. What kind of quality and performance can you guarantee?
Look for providers with multiple Points of Presence (PoPs) and interconnections with top-tier carriers around the world for high-quality, reliable services. The best providers will reduce the number of hops your calls must take across networks and limit potential delays from transcoding between networks.
Don’t forget to ask about your SIP trunk provider’s experience, too. Providers with a proven history of providing globally available services have an advantage over startups or those with minimal service reach. Newer providers may not yet have infrastructure and support operations in place to scale to meet the needs of global enterprises.
5. What support do you offer?
Providers will often differentiate themselves on metrics like mean time to repair, scope, and support availability (e.g. 7x24x365 vs business hours only). In addition, customer ratings such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) can give you an idea of how likely a customer will recommend a service, and Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), which illustrates how effectively the provider’s support answered their needs.
Remember that cloud communications shouldn’t be complicated, and a good provider should feel like a partner. You deserve a clear idea of how they’re going to help your employees or clients by creating an ideal offering based on your business.
Learn more about SIP Trunking for your enterprise or check out these resources:
- PRI to SIP: Making the jump
- SIP trunking benefits and best practices
- How to choose a SIP trunking provider
Bandwidth: A global SIP trunk solution
If you’re ready to look at potential SIP trunking providers, you’re already off to a good start. With Bandwidth as your provider, here’s what you get:
- Access >90% of the GDP with coverage across 60+ countries (and growing) with a single SIP connection.
- Two-way voice, emergency, and messaging that’s easy to integrate into communications platforms, apps, and beyond.
- Fully compliant SIP lines into every market for long-term availability, stability, and quality
With Bandwidth, there are no language barriers, no contractual barriers, no time barriers. Just the right sort of business-speak.
