It’s a common sales pitch from traditional telecommunications providers: “If you consolidate it all with us, we’ll save you money and get you the best service.” This might be the case if you have a single office and a dozen lines, but if you are a large, multi-location company with dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of locations, then consolidation is simply a pipe dream — no single carrier can give you the best rate, everywhere, every time.
“Using multiple different carriers is often the best route for large corporations. The challenge is you’ll need help to manage them all,” says Brent Saxon, vice president of sales/general manager of Simplify Inc. “When you ask someone if they like their current carrier, often the answer is ‘no,’ and it’s not because they did a bad job on an install three years ago when they initially got that contract,” Saxon says. “It’s because they haven’t provided the day-to-day support the customer needed over the complete life cycle.”
Smart Business spoke with Saxon about how to leverage knowledge of the telecommunication industry to get continual support for your business.
What exactly is life cycle support, and why is it important?
LCS covers the long-term strategic initiatives as well as the day-to-day tasks. In essence, it’s the support that you get on the carrier side: how they support your account after the sale, how they process MACDs, new installs, trouble tickets and billing issues. If you have to do new installations, add a location, or need to change or delete something, how do the carriers support you? It goes beyond the fulfillment of the task. Who is updating you on the timing of the task and its completion percentage? Who notifies you when a delay occurs?
Large corporations always struggle to support all of their locations or facilities. If you have a corporate headquarters and 200 to 300 sites, you are responsible for managing those sites, those trouble tickets. You are responsible for looking at invoices every month, spotting and handling billing issues. You have to make sure carriers are hitting their due dates for new installations. If someone needs a disconnection, you are the one who is managing multiple carriers to get that done. For the large multi-location company, the process of managing their own business through the carriers is a daunting task.