How To Avoid Being Conned In Telecoms - 03/03/11
Posted by Cloudnet Telecommunications on Thu, Mar 03, 2011 @ 06:54 AM
The telecoms industry in the UK pays a lot of commission to the sales people to sell business phone systems. The sales people are therefore highly motivated to get sales at all costs and will not always tell the truth to get a deal. 
Add to this the fact that there are a large number of companies who sell solutions to the companies that employ these sales people for them to resell at whatever price they like and the situation is very difficult for a customer. This is called “white labelling” and the people who resell these white labelled products are called “the channel”. If you Google “white label telecoms” you will see a lot of these companies proudly offering the channel their wares. Other companies in telecoms really don't want you to know this.
Hosted VoIP solutions have given us all the opportunity to break away from this situation. Birchills Telecom does buy or sell white labelled products and publishes all it's prices on the web. It is all clear and transparent and we do our best to keep it simple. When you buy from Birchills Telecom you can be confident that you are getting the best deal that we can afford to offer up front.
So what are the stories that I have heard over the years?
Leases are very popular with unscrupulous sales men (and of course unscrupulous leasing companies). A common trick is that the salesman tells you that there is no cost for your phone system but gets you to sign a contract - assuring you that there is no point in reading it. You sign the deal and the phone system arrives, is installed and works. So you are happy until 2 years later you suddenly get a huge bill. What you had really signed was a delayed repayment lease where the repayments starts 2 years after you sign. The leasing company has a document that says that you have read and agreed to the terms and they will sue you for the money.
A variant we heard the other day was that the lease that was signed was a perfectly good lease but the salesman popped back in to say that his dog had eaten the original - so would the customer just sign another copy? The customer obligingly signed the new copy which was now a 12 year lease with onerous clauses.
The leasing company pays out substantial commission on the lease which together with the substantial commission on the sale makes the salesman very happy indeed and you nursing a very bad deal. A rule of thumb is that about a 3rd of the initial purchase price will go in commission.
The salesman will often tell you of the huge cost savings the system will make you and provide a quote showing how much you will save. However the savings will be based on a set of notional costs which greatly exceed what you are really paying.
Of course businesses feel that they can bypass all of these kinds of problems by only dealing with large companies such as BT. Whilst I am sure that BT would deplore the tactics I've just told you about the fact remains that as a small business you will be dealing with a salesman from BTLB or BT local business which is not the same as BT at all. BTLB was originally a network of 77 local independent franchises that operated across the UK. The number of franchises has declined until now there were 44 at the last count. So when you meet a BTLB sales person they will be working for an independent company and very probably be making that all important commission.
So good luck if you are going down the traditional purchasing route. However there is another way.
About Birchills Telecom
Birchills Telecom provides reliable cloud based communication systems for SME's, based on high speed internet telephony- hosted voice over internet protocol (VOIP). We are small and friendly and very green.
We offer a simple system that is available next day without any of the hard sell based on a reliable product.
Without any capital expenditure you gain the benefits of free calls within our network and less expensive calls outside. The system represents a giant leap in functionality, is never out of date, has no maintenance charges and is at a fraction of previous pricing models.
The team has developed our platform and the technology behind it. Birchills Telecom is the only company to concentrate purely on our Internet based solution – the switchboard in the sky.
We give you :-
• Free calls within the network
• Lowest subscription costs in UK
This is third generation hosted VoIP made simple powered by SIP available on demand.
Written by David Hill, Chairman Birchills Telecom