5 Reasons You're Paying Too Much for VoIP Services

The VoIP services market is flooded with providers big and small, all guaranteeing that their plan’s prices and communications features completely outdo the efforts of the competition. Of course, all companies are within their rights to make such claims—unfortunately, customers are the ones that feel the pinch when those claims don’t meet expectations.

Big names in the landscape of national phone providers boast marketing budgets that cast a wide net over potential customers. This enables them to initiate national marketing campaigns you can see on television, on billboards, and over the airwaves on smart devices. What those ads don’t tell you is that there’s a decent chance you’re going to be left under-serviced and over-charged by these big brands.

How’s that for fine print?

VoIP Services For Every Price Point

CCi Voice works with companies across an array of industries. We provide VoIP services and much more to local small businesses, large enterprises, nonprofit organizations, learning institutions, healthcare providers, municipalities, and contact centers. In each partnership, we kick start our VoIP implementation while being completely transparent about our prices. We do this because … well, because we have nothing to hide.

So, how do you know you’re paying too much for phone services and you should consider switching to a VoIP service provider? Fortunately we’ve been in this business for long enough to know the telltale signs of a business phone-related ripoff.

Here are five reasons you’re paying too much for VoIP Phone Services.

1. No Flexible Pricing

Remember those national provider marketing budgets we mentioned earlier? Where do you think these companies get the money to kick off such campaigns? It comes from you and the charges you incur on a daily basis. And in order to fund their efforts to a satisfying extent, big brands have to be super rigid with their pricing.

This means you’ll often be charged for advanced features you don’t need. For example, advanced features like voicemail and softphone aren’t necessary add-ons to the courtesy phone in your waiting area or the phone in your break room. But most provider’s VoIP plans aren’t customizable in that regard—instead, you’re made to pay for everything, even if you don’t want or need everything.

While CCi Voice charges per user, all features are available to every user. Conversely, we offer flexible pricing for a limited number of users per partnership. This means we can adjust the cost for a percentage of your overall users, catering to your specific needs.

2. Bad Customer Service

National VoIP providers often fall short on customer service. They could have a wonderful and expansive set of features, but their approach to customer service is more self-serving than helpful to customers. When you call these large providers, you’re typically met with instructions on how to use an online portal or virtual chat. These options can work for simple administrative changes, but if you require more nuanced assistance, good luck with that.

When you can’t connect with your provider beyond chatting with a bot, you won’t be able to take full advantage of all the features as advertised. Most of the time, a large provider won’t even know you’re missing out on benefits—in fact, they don’t even know who you are. What’s more, these big brands might even charge you for merely calling and asking for help!

You can call CCi Voice at any time and for any reason. In fact, we want you to call us! We do not charge for customer requests, whether it's for troubleshooting, call programming, testing, or best practices advice. And you’ll always be able to talk with an actual human.

3. Unnecessary Monthly Fees

Some of the bigger VoIP providers have no problem hiding unnecessary monthly expenses on your bill. Often disguised by legalese, these charges add up and can wreak havoc on a small business’ bottom line. An extra dollar here, three extra dollars there, and before you know it, you’re overpaying for “premium” features that go completely unused.

Unlike our competitors, CCi Voice is not in the business of piling on unnecessary, mysterious monthly fees for feature sets and service levels. With CCi Voice, you pay one price and get access to everything—at a far lower cost per user than the national companies can even dream of offering.

4. You’re Paying Too Much For Features

There are some features that larger providers consider “extra” and charge you for the privilege of utilizing them. These features include features such as Call Reporting, Call Recording, Voicemail to Email, SMS Text Messaging, and more. CCi Voice does not charge extra for these features, instead, we include them and more in our basic VoIP package for all of our customers.

Some of the popular features we include for free are:

• Call Recording: CCi allows customers to record calls, either by the press of a button or by supervisors for agent calls.
• Call Reporting: CCi’s reporting is extensive, both for regular and for queue calls, and can be automatically scheduled with ease, so managers get daily or weekly updates on sales or contact center calls by their staff.
• Voicemail to Email: Any voicemail message you receive can be sent to you as an email with an attached WAV file so you can listen on your computer or smartphone.
• SMS Text Messaging: Send texts from an app, using your land line that is on our service. MMS, with the capability of sending photos, will also soon be available.
• “Keep Your Place In Line and Get a Call Back When It Is Your Turn”: Offer this to your customers after three or four callers are waiting in the queue. Then, when their turn comes up, the system will call your customer back, putting them back in the queue to be answered. This is an expensive upgrade by some carriers.
• Monitor, Whisper, Barge-In: Ideal for contact centers, see who is on a call and with which customer. Monitor it live, whisper into the agent’s ear, advise what to say, or barge-in on the call to assist with the conversation at hand.

5. You Have A Lot Of Users And You’re Paying Full Price

Let’s say you’re a school with an expansive campus or a contact center with scores of stations or a large enterprise business that’s only going to expand. You have a lot of users and many, many stations that will require a phone. The big national companies salivate at the prospect of netting your business because they know the more phone setups you need, the more they can charge you.

At CCi Voice, we offer an “economy of scale” pricing model. Basically, the larger you are, the lower your cost per user will be. It equals a cost effectiveness that cannot be matched by any national provider. And, as your business grows or as your needs expand, CCi Voice can scale your structure up or down with little more than a quick phone call. Do you have a sister company or are you part of a larger group? Get us into each site and your price will go down even more!

So You’ve Spent Too Much For VoIP. Now What?

In the process of working with some VoIP providers, you end up spending way too much money on VoIP phone services. And while that’s capital you’ll never get back, you can make a course correction and switch to a VoIP provider that actually has processes in place that are meant to save your budget without sacrificing services and features.

View the CCi Voice pricing and competitive analysis page to see
how cost-effective we are!