In our ever-evolving distributed work ecosystem, more organizations see the value of cloud-based communications and enterprise collaboration tools. These solutions empower businesses and their teams with flexible, reliable, high-quality communications without hardware disruptions or complicated contracts that often accompany legacy telecom providers. When an organization decides to move from on-prem to cloud-based communications or even change existing cloud solutions to a different provider, the decision process can seem daunting. The good news is that managed service providers (MSPs) can coordinate these transitions and streamline communications infrastructure management.
Partnering with an MSP is like teaming up with a group of skilled experts who know the ins and outs of a specific technology, industry, and the step-by-step implementation process. MSPs are particularly valuable if your company does not want to hold the responsibility of managing its IT solutions but still wants to improve the flexibility, efficiency, and scalability of the solutions. Essentially, choosing an MSP helps an organization continually enhance its communications system because an MSP will incorporate new technologies on an ongoing basis that best match the organization’s needs. In addition, a company can also outsource aspects of its IT department and workflows to professionals within the MSP, which can be more cost-effective than a company deploying and managing these solutions alone.
Another positive outcome of working with an MSP is experiencing enhanced and higher-quality communications. The role of MSP is to ensure your communication services remain top-notch in quality by continuously monitoring, delivering, and evaluating the quality of your voice calls, and addressing any issues. This extra support translates into crisper, clearer, and more secure real-time voice interactions. In summary, MSPs can offer a variety of benefits to companies looking to reduce the complexity of managing communications without sacrificing security, reliability or quality of operations.
Another positive outcome of working with an MSP is experiencing enhanced and higher-quality communications. The role of MSP is to ensure your communication services remain top-notch in quality by continuously monitoring, delivering, and evaluating the quality of your voice calls and addressing any issues. This extra support translates into clearer, more secure real-time voice interactions. In summary, MSPs can offer a variety of benefits to companies looking to reduce the complexity of managing communications without sacrificing security, reliability, or quality of operations.
So, how can you find the right MSP for your business? The MSP market is highly competitive and saturated, making it overwhelming to differentiate one from another. So before beginning the search, it’s a good idea to first take a look and audit your current business needs and objectives for cloud-based communications. What goals are you trying to accomplish in making this change – more reliable and secure coverage, no matter the location? Or maybe it’s 24/7 customer service support to walk you through the setup process and address any disruptions? Enhanced scalability to accommodate your plans to expand? When doing this exercise, you’ll be able to pull out your top communications needs, which will help guide you to find the right MSP that matches those needs.
In addition to the above exercise, we outlined our recommended best practices for evaluating and selecting the right MSP within the cloud communications space.
Cloud familiarity. While the cloud has become less of a novel technology as adoption has increased, it’s still ideal to find an MSP with an established track record in the cloud communications space. It’s recommended to seek out an MSP that relies on cloud infrastructure and has in-depth expertise on how phone numbers and networks operate in this environment. The cloud market is heavily saturated and constantly changing, so a cloud-native MSP will have the foresight and background knowledge to be able to discern between the variety of communications services and recommend the best offerings for your business. You’ll also want to find an MSP that offers end-to-end offerings for your whole cloud journey, from implementation to management to continually scaling offerings to meet new needs.
Global capabilities. If you also serve an international customer base or want to expand to new countries, find an MSP that offers global phone number coverage. So, when evaluating providers, ask about the MSP’s international calling and messaging capabilities. International, cloud-based, local, and toll-free inbound telephone numbers will help an organization scale into new global markets while maintaining a local presence. If global expansion plans are on the horizon for your business, find an MSP that can extend the reach of your network without incurring network expansion costs.
Scalability. Because of their expertise and extended carrier network, MSPs can help you evolve your business and keep a pulse on when it might be time to scale up or down based on patterns they see. Therefore, consider partnering with an MSP that has the flexibility and agility to expand with your business and can recommend offerings that will complement your growth and ensure you’re meeting forecasted business goals.
A toolbox of resources and support. As mentioned previously, a vital advantage of an MSP is getting access to the providers’ professional experience and their knowledge of the industry. Most MSPs have years of experience in their respective industries and can anticipate trends, so they can scale their offerings quicker to accommodate market changes. When searching for the right MSP, it’s important to find one with a range of products, network resources, and features that match your communications needs. Such features can be improved security, access to international DIDs numbers, higher quality voice communications, and increased visibility into customer interactions. MSPs also have established relationships with carriers that will help your business obtain products, software, and certifications at a reasonable price. Another positive outcome of an MSP is ensuring your communications services remain top-notch by continuously monitoring and evaluating the quality of voice calls to mitigate issues. So when assessing MSPs in the market, keep in mind accessibility, quality, and in-depth customer support.
At Flowroute, we are always looking for ways to evolve our offerings and grow our partner network. Our partner program provides our partners, and their customers access to benefits including superior call quality, priority customer support, discounted rates on offerings, and joint marketing efforts. We have experience working with a variety of MSPs and resellers to build, support and expand their products and services.
In addition, we are excited to be part of the BCM One family, which provides managed SIP trunking services. BCM One integrates, maintains, secures, and manages businesses’ voice communications to ensure customers have access to the highest level of services without the hassles of third-party applications. Find out more here.
