Mergers and acquisitions happen – it seems every other day – in the telecom industry. If your Unified Communications provider has been acquired, what will be the impact to your business?
Here are five things you should investigate.
- What happens to your UC platform? Will it go away, to be replaced with a new, unfamiliar system?
- What happens to Customer Service? Are the friendly sales or support staff with whom you’ve been working still going to be there? Who will answer your call? Will they know how to fix your issue? Or will customer service be outsourced to a company unfamiliar with your services and needs?
- What happens to your contract? Will you have to move from month-to-month to annual or longer-term? And, will your provider’s Service Level Agreements change? How about after-hours support?
- How will the change impact your business operations? If your existing provider integrates their phone service with your Salesforce, Oracle, or HubSpot account, will the new company continue to do so? How will they deal with the migration?
- How about business continuity in case of a disaster, at your site or your provider’s? One of the primary reasons you may have chosen UC as a Service is for the failover and redundancy. Find out how the new company will protect your business in case of disaster.
At times of change, competitors will swoop in with negative messages to create doubt and entice you to make a switch. Consider how well integrated your current UC platform is with other business tools, and how simple or difficult it could be to switch. Talk to an IT consultant or a contact a prospective new provider. Maybe a complete switch will be necessary; but it might be a switch for the better, with a stronger, more modern and more-customer focused company.
