Our approach to selecting phones for the Voxhub Service
Voxhub is a service provider that aims to encompass every aspect of the end to end experience for our customers. A key area that keeps members of our team busy behind the scenes is selecting the phones that we would recommend to our customers. We do not have a store selling every type of phone and telecom, we are much more interested in giving you the right kit rather than simply selling you things! Selecting a phone might seem like a simple process from the outside but we have several levels of criteria that we wish to investigate before putting our name to a phone. This article provides an overview of what we do and why.
From day one we worked out that all phones are not equal. It's obvious but people often focus on price over any other aspect. You can get great value phones but when you start looking for the cheapest then you find that the compromises on components, build quality and software that runs the devices impacts the quality of voice calls and our service. We don't feel comfortable supplying or recommending phones that reduce the quality of our service to customers and put us in a position where a customer is unhappy with us for the limitations or shortcomings of a phone they have bought from us.
Every phone we supply meets our strict standards for selection!
1. Is the phone fit for purpose, what are the limitations and would any customer want it?
2. Is the phone reliable under regular and heavy usage in real world environments?
3. Will the price, feature set, build quality and perceived value of the phone appeal to our customers?
4. Is the phone secure, maintainable and does it have auto-provisioning capabilities for us to configure it?
Depending on how well a phone fares in our research and testing we will decide on whether we wish to support and supply the phone. We find that our selection criteria and scoring requires some flexibility to take in to account what alternatives are available otherwise we would have no phones at all. For example, in specialist areas like video phones, conferencing or where disability requirements are essential we can have few phones to select from.
We usually have a period of time where one of the team will use the phone as their main phone and give us feedback on how it works, together with any plus points or shortcomings from day to day usage.
For the lucky phones the hard work has just begun
Once a phone has made the grade our team has several important bits of work to prepare the phone for customer use.
1. Confirm the optimal configuration, include it in our service software and add to our provisioning servers.
2. Prepare documentation for customers and for our team to ensure everyone knows how to use it!
3. Add the phone to our test suite to guarantee continued compatibility with our service and other equipment customers will use it with.
4. Get our team to try out the phone, learn how to use it and get a feel for it in real life.
We don't intend to supply every phone under the sun
Just because we do not supply a phone does not mean a phone is not good enough for us! We often try phones and find that there is no compelling reason to add them to our service nor enough customer requests to warrant it. We do however continue to evaluate new phones to our offering to ensure customers have enough choices and as models appear with feature improvements.