By Dan Baldwin
The number one reason Southern California based multi-location business customers buy from independent telecom agents is that we keep track of what's going on with all the business phone service carriers and wide area data network providers that a business customer can choose from in a reasonably objective way.
When we make a carrier recommendation to a client, we generally say, "Here's three different carriers you really can't go wrong with but we like XYZ carrier the most for what you're trying to achieve."
While there's been lots of rumors in the press lately about executives leaving XO or XO being positioned for a sale by majority owner Carl Icahn, none of the public or private information we've seen about XO changes our opinion about when we think XO is better than other prospective carriers for a specific business customer.
XO's One of the Best for Nationwide Price and Network
For any multi-location business with branches in the 75 national metro markets served by XO, XO "must be quoted" as they've established themselves as a price leader. XO's consistent pricing for almost any location in the country makes XO "very easy to buy" for multi-location corporate customers.
With XO there's no pricing tricks or "invoice gotchas". Every location across the country pays pretty much the same price for the same service or bucket of voice minutes. Independent telecom agents often wish that all their carriers could price out and bill as easily as XO.
And the network is as good as the price. While even the best voice carriers and data service providers suffer outages, XO's outage rate is not significantly different from their nearest competitors and well within their service level agreements.
The Only Current Hit on XO is...
No business phone service carrier is perfect and neither is XO. Direct sales people for carriers that compete with XO are quick to spread rumors about customer service challenges. Some have said, "Sure they're easy to buy...Too bad they're hard to install (giggle, giggle)."
Well we would not be proper independent advocates for our business clients if we did not concede to the fact that it currently takes XO a bit longer than we'd like to get some services installed or other challenges fixes. The problem may stem from the internal re-allocation of resources or some other internal matter that customers or telecom agents have no influence over.
But the majority of our current XO customers know nothing of this because as their telecom agent, installation and customer service challenges our ours to resolve on behalf of our customers. We're the ones on the phone with XO solving our customer's problems, not our customers.
Why is this not a problem?
When our business customers advise us that they want to buy the best network at the lowest price with no invoice tricks, we know they're going to take a good hard look at XO and we want to be the independent experts that bring XO to the table (as opposed to an XO direct rep.)
XO is almost always one of the three carriers we recommend for customers in XO's footprint - and often the one we lead with when it's right for the customer. None of what we like about XO will change based on Carl Icahn's decision to sell XO to another party or keep XO forever.
As far as the customer service challenges go, they're being solved two ways - by us and by XO. The help from XO comes in the form of a recently announced XO Platinum Partner program that will focus XO's customer challenge resources on XO's best independent partners.
The help from us is by making sure your XO orders are placed through our master agent, an XO Platinum Partner. Between our own staff, the staff of our XO Platinum Partner and the high end XO customer service managers assigned to XO's Platinum Partners, if you've got a XO customer service problem it's going to be addressed by more people than you've got fingers.
Bottom Line: If XO's Right For Your Business, We Like XO
XO has been and is a business voice and data market leader for quite some time. We don't expect that to change and that's why we like XO for our multi-location business clients looking for a great price on a great nation-wide network without any "invoice gotchas" to worry about - especially if you're looking for a business phone service alternative to AT&T or Verizon.
Looking for a Southern California based, vendor neutral business communications technology service expert that can help you out with your multi-location telecom or data network problems?
Click here to learn about how we might be able to fix your problem for free, then contact me directly at 951-251-5155 or [email protected].
BaldwinTel helps multi-location businesses across the United States but specializes Southern California especially San Diego County, Orange County, Los Angeles County, Riverside County and San Bernardino County.
Comments