Cloud Voice: How to Choose the Best Phone Service for your Business

Cloud voice, or Internet phone systems, continue to increase in popularity. They offer a cost-effective way for SMB’s to communicate with their customers. For SMB’s with multiple employees, cloud voice services offer advantages over mobile phones.

With all the companies to choose from, how do you choose the best service for your business? Ultimately, a SMB owner knows their business best. But here are three things to look at to evaluate the best cloud voice service for business.

Cloud Voice Provider’s Customer Service

A solid service provider makes it easier to contact them. The more ways to contact, the better. Having a customer support number, email address, and live chat enables the customer to choose the most convenient method for them to communicate.

Astoundant makes contacting support even easier. Customers can dial 999 on any connected extension to reach customer support directly. We offer this in addition to our toll free number, support email, and live chat. Customers can also open a support ticket by filling out a website form, or logging into their account.

Prompt responses also indicate solid customer service. Researching a company’s history of customer service complaints on Google will help. If Google doesn’t provide any meaningful results, ask for a list of references from the company.

Service Reliability

Determining service reliability before signing up for service seems impossible, but there are two ways to do this. Like evaluating customer service, customer references can also help with determining cloud voice service reliability.

Many service providers offer a free trial. It takes at least 10-14 days to properly evaluate Internet phone service. A cloud voice provider can look their best with one trial phone call or 250 free minutes. And having access to all features helps, too.

Cloud Voice Service Guarantees

Providers are hesitant to provide service guarantees. Many issues with Internet phone service stem from poor Internet connections. Many poor Internet connection issues stem from a customer’s malfunctioning or poorly configured on-premises Internet hardware. This can especially be tricky because VoIP traffic works differently than web browser or Internet traffic. A poor Internet connection may mean a slight delay on a web page or streaming video, and it may not be noticeable. But a poor Internet connection for a VoIP call is very noticeable.

Astoundant provides two service guarantees. A money back guarantee in the first 30 days of service. We will ask a couple of questions about why a customer decided to quit so we can get better. But other than that, no hassle. For customers who stick with us longer than 30 days, we guarantee that we will deliver cloud voice service to their Internet doorstep. If something goes wrong on our end, we will apply a prorated refund to the customer’s account so they don’t pay for the time our service failed.

While Internet services have become much more stable and reliable, they still aren’t perfect. As much redundancy and maintenance we perform daily on our cloud voice systems, things still go wrong occasionally. Our service guarantee often means we spend extra time troubleshooting issues on behalf of customers. We use tools that test the Internet connection strength from our cloud voice system to the customer’s Internet doorstep. In the many instances when we find an issue beyond our system, we work with the customer’s Internet service provider to assist them with pinpointing and resolving the issue.