Hey folks.
I am one of two partners in a small office - 10 people.
We retired our legacy phone system and installed VoIP about three months ago. It has been rocky. Our IT guy first had all kinds of trouble configuring the handsets. Then we had intermittent but serious problems with dropouts during calls. Various problems with our ISP, our service provider, and our internal switches and routers were diagnosed and supposedly fixed. But the problems keep cropping up. It doesn't help that the handset provider (Yealink), the service provider (Vocal IP) and the ISP (Optimum) keep saying it's the other guy's problem, or our internal problem.
We have a 300/300 line so bandwidth per se is not an issue.
My partner is 71 and supposedly going into semi-retirement, which is one of the reasons we wanted VoIP (have a handset at home, voicemails emailed to him, electronically generated log of calls and callers, etc). When he's in the office, he's our chief rainmaker so what he mostly does is talk on the phone all day with his hundreds of contacts. He is absolutely ripshit and I can't blame him. As the junior partner with the responsibility for the back-of-the house systems, I'm bleeding credibility and wasting lots of time with troubleshooting and scraping him off the ceiling.
Our IT guy (independent consultant, not FT employee) has worked well with us for many years and we like him a lot but this is turning into a fiasco. He keeps insisting that the problems have been diagnosed and fixed but they keep cropping up. I have asked him if this technology is within his skillset and if he needs to bring in help. He insists that he can handle it and that he has the same system with roughly the same number of users in his office, and he set it up and it works fine. Our recurring problems would seem to indicate that he is overestimating his capability to troubleshoot and keep us out of trouble. I don't want to bust his balls but it's now harming our business and both he and I are bleeding credibility with my partner.
We could cancel our VoIP contract and go back to fiber-optic Verizon; we still have the old phones. But it would take a while and be ugly. I'm also leery of staying with a dinosaur technology.
Question: what can I do here? Get a VoIP-specialist consultant? Our old phone guy isn't a VoIP guy. Or do we have to live with a certain amount of instability? Or do we just cut our losses and switch back?
Mind you I'm not talking about troubleshooting and solving specific problem X. I want to ensure an environment of maximum stability and have a good support framework for resolving issues quickly going forward.
Thanks.
I am one of two partners in a small office - 10 people.
We retired our legacy phone system and installed VoIP about three months ago. It has been rocky. Our IT guy first had all kinds of trouble configuring the handsets. Then we had intermittent but serious problems with dropouts during calls. Various problems with our ISP, our service provider, and our internal switches and routers were diagnosed and supposedly fixed. But the problems keep cropping up. It doesn't help that the handset provider (Yealink), the service provider (Vocal IP) and the ISP (Optimum) keep saying it's the other guy's problem, or our internal problem.
We have a 300/300 line so bandwidth per se is not an issue.
My partner is 71 and supposedly going into semi-retirement, which is one of the reasons we wanted VoIP (have a handset at home, voicemails emailed to him, electronically generated log of calls and callers, etc). When he's in the office, he's our chief rainmaker so what he mostly does is talk on the phone all day with his hundreds of contacts. He is absolutely ripshit and I can't blame him. As the junior partner with the responsibility for the back-of-the house systems, I'm bleeding credibility and wasting lots of time with troubleshooting and scraping him off the ceiling.
Our IT guy (independent consultant, not FT employee) has worked well with us for many years and we like him a lot but this is turning into a fiasco. He keeps insisting that the problems have been diagnosed and fixed but they keep cropping up. I have asked him if this technology is within his skillset and if he needs to bring in help. He insists that he can handle it and that he has the same system with roughly the same number of users in his office, and he set it up and it works fine. Our recurring problems would seem to indicate that he is overestimating his capability to troubleshoot and keep us out of trouble. I don't want to bust his balls but it's now harming our business and both he and I are bleeding credibility with my partner.
We could cancel our VoIP contract and go back to fiber-optic Verizon; we still have the old phones. But it would take a while and be ugly. I'm also leery of staying with a dinosaur technology.
Question: what can I do here? Get a VoIP-specialist consultant? Our old phone guy isn't a VoIP guy. Or do we have to live with a certain amount of instability? Or do we just cut our losses and switch back?
Mind you I'm not talking about troubleshooting and solving specific problem X. I want to ensure an environment of maximum stability and have a good support framework for resolving issues quickly going forward.
Thanks.
