TelecomMedic Success Story

Recently it has occurred to me that many of my blogs have focused on issues that I think can and should be improved within the Agent to Vendor/Master business model. However, it occurred to me that I haven’t spent nearly enough time talking about the good parts of the model. Our customers benefit in many ways by using an Agent, as opposed to ordering services directly from a Vendor. So, I have decided to try to start sprinkling in what is good along with what can be improved. This is my first ‘What’s Good’ blog, so I will be interested to see how it is received. Basically, I want to get the word out there about why using an Agency like TelecomMedic can help businesses “make money, save money, or make employees more effective.”

A local company with a rather large call center came to us because a big bad Telecom company was really messing up their ability to receive calls. This company was doing about $16K/month in Long Distance via SIP trunking over a 50 Meg Fiber Internet connection. The SIP trunks were constantly going down and if they needed to add trunks during busy periods, it was taking up to a week to make the change. As you can imagine, a week later they were not needed for the emergency anymore.

Our team at TelecomMedic went to their offices to discover their pain points. We came out of the meeting discovering four major issues. First, was that the mega-conglomerate Telco had locations all over the country and they never knew who or where to go for issues. Their second issue was the fact that they could not “burst” their SIP trunks during periods of heavy traffic. Thirdly, a major issue took well over 24 hours to repair, and they were not meeting their SLA. Finally, their sales rep was a revolving door of different people in bad suits (OK, I added the bad suit part).

After that meeting, we rolled up our sleeves and took a very detailed look at their issues, locations and the possible options from our many different carriers. For this customer we determined that, whereas a number of carriers could support the required services, one was clearly the best for this customer’s needs. Many times we will propose multiple solutions to a company along with the pros and cons of the different companies/services. In this case, it was clear that First Communications was the best fit for our client. First Communications has a 24/7 NOC that is located about 20 minutes from the customers office. I told the customer that if they ever have a really bad outage, they could just drive over to the NOC to yell and scream. Pain point number one fixed. Secondly, First Comm would have no issue bursting their SIP trunks (for a nominal fee of course…). Thirdly, they gave them an SLA that stated they could have permanent SIP trunks up in 24 hours if they did not want to pay the bursting fee. Finally, the beauty of working with an Agency, like TelecomMedic, solved the problem of having to deal with multiple different representatives. When you sign with an Agent/Agency you actually write the contract on First Comm’s paper. This way, you have the Agent/Agency and the entire team at First Comm at the customer’s disposal to assist when problems arise.

I cannot express the importance of the last pain point more. It is the biggest problem I see when customers go directly to the Mega Telco instead of going through an Agency. A direct sales rep gets paid to hunt, kill, eat, and repeat. They usually have no interest in the customer after the ink on the paper is dry.

Agencies like TelecomMedic get paid a residual income for the life of the contract. Typically, Agencies do not charge the customer any fees for the service they provide such as researching best solutions, problem solving and dealing with any issues throughout the course of the contract. All fees are paid by the underlying carrier. It is in the Agencies best interest to ensure the customer is happy. Agencies want you to be their customer for life, so they are strongly incented to make sure that the customer is completely happy with their services as long as they are using them. You will never see a revolving door of sales people and you will always know who to call first when you have an issue.

In the end we brought the customers billing down by about $2,000.00 per month from their previous carrier, TelecomMedic was able to provide them with a much better SLA, give them local representation, and help them do what they do best…..manage their business and not worry about their Telecommunications issues. We relieved four major pain points and saved them money.

Good Agencies have access to many different carriers so they can customize solutions to fit their customer’s needs. Most successful agencies work with at least one Master Agency which gives them the ability to offer dozens of solutions for any given circumstance. X4 Solutions, one of the best Master Agencies around in my opinion, was instrumental in helping us with this customer.

Because TelecomMedic has the knowledge and skills required to assist with Telecommunications needs, we receive testimonials similar to this one from Curt Allen President of X4 Solutions:

“Bill and his team have done here what they do on a regular basis for their customers. His group has uncovered a very specific need and through deep knowledge of relative carrier strengths, leveraged the right solution from the right provider to get the solution that fit the bill. In this case specifically, Bill recognized that First Comm has evolved into much more than the local CLEC that could provision a T1 fast. With the robust network assets and expanded product portfolio, First Comm was the perfect fit to provide everything a larger carrier could but with the local hands on feel that the customer needed.”