I can’t believe it’s June! It has been an exciting year at Cytracom, and we have been very busy… that is probably why time is going by so fast! Earlier this year we launched Ivie, our Intelligent Voice Platform, and I wrote the first part of this blog series. As a quick recap, we built Ivie to enable our partners with better visibility, more control, and deeper insight into the valuable voice services offered to their clients.

Our first Ivie-powered application was Voice Continuity. Voice continuity acts like a BDR for your customers’ phone system, protecting their voice just like their data. It employs automated failover policies and intelligent quality monitoring to guard against loss of phone service due to outages, interruptions or degraded quality. I truly believe Voice Continuity is changing how and why MSPs sell VoIP—and I want to dive into that topic today.

I think we all know why MSPs sell VoIP. If you don’t offer it, another provider will… and then, they will be in the position to backfill your managed services contract. While adding VoIP to your portfolio may not offer the most “reward,” it certainly carries a great risk if you leave it out. That being said, many MSPs still shy away from selling VoIP. At the end of the day, it just does not seem to fit the MSP business model. Your techs are generally more comfortable talking about BDR, security, networking and the like. When it comes to VoIP, they simply do not always know how to have the conversation—or when to make the sale.

Voice Continuity changes everything.

If there’s one topic every MSP knows, it is business continuity. Most MSPs talk about business continuity every day with their customers. With recent natural disasters and the billions of dollars lost in business due to these outages, it’s easy to understand why a continuity plan is so important. Voice Continuity from Cytracom allows MSPs to naturally extend VoIP into their business continuity conversations. Simply ask your customers, “If your phone system goes down, how long can you be without a way for customers to reach you?” Without Voice Continuity, their business is exposed. By framing VoIP this way, MSPs can elevate the sale into a business conversation—rather than a technical discussion customers are not interested in having.

So, when do you have this conversation with your customers?

Last month, we talked about quarterly business reviews (QBRs) in our blog.

QBRs provide the perfect setting to review your customer’s voice network and current business continuity plan—and propose solutions that solve key challenges. Are they on an obsolete premises-based PBX? Are their handsets from the ‘90s? Some of these items you can visually observe when you are in the office, and others can be discovered through a series of questions. As I mentioned earlier, the best question to ask is “what happens when your phone system goes down? How long would it take you to get back in service?” Unfortunately, we see partners scramble to help customers with phone outages when there is no backup plan in place... and when that legacy system is down, it is next to impossible to get replacement parts and support in the moment of need. Use scenarios like this to start a conversation about making sure the customer has a solid plan in place in case of an interruption. You are already talking about business continuity when it comes to your customers’ servers and their data. Make sure you don’t leave voice out of the conversation.