Work to understand your specific strategies and challenges.

All businesses are different, from the customers they target, to the businesses they compete with, to the services or products they offer. In order to identify the best-fit solution for your business, we first concentrate on understanding your business. Through consultations with executive management in sales, customer services and marketing we document a high level business strategy perspective to provide the guiding principles for the evaluation, selection and implementation of the ideal Unified Business Communications solution.

• What is your current business model (e.g. brick & mortar retail, E-Commerce, etc)?

• Who are your primary target customers or clients?

• How is your success or performance measured?

• What are your biggest challenges or impediments to success?

Review, verify and document your current operations environment and costs:

• An audit of billing and usage data from your current service providers of voice, broadband internet and technical support providers. In addition to confirming the exact level of services you are getting (or not!), we many times are able to identify duplicate service or over billing situations.

• Assess your current local area and broadband networking environments, including current and proposed cyber security services to protect you from ransomware, malware and other business crippling attacks. We can also detail options to extend your network to support remote workers using SD-WAN, Virtual Private Networks, and other technologies. We look at options to optimize your broadband internet service utilizing fiber and coax service from multiple carriers such as A.T.&T, Verizon, Comcast and many others. Network reliability and redundancy issues can be addressed with multiple carriers and services such as SD-WAN implementations.

• Review of your current marketing and advertising spend for SEO and lead generation services (FaceBook, LinkedIn, GoogleAds, etc.) and help identify solutions or approaches that can attribute these leads to specific customer interaction channels (Call Center, Web site/Chat, etc.) and actual sales conversions. This will help you optimize your spend to match your desired results.

• Document the internal technical resources available to support your existing and future Unified Communications systems and services.

• Review and document existing site floor plans, including data and voice network and cabling diagrams. One of the key challenges in implementing high quality IP communications services is the integrity of the existing network switches and cabling quality within the facilities. Many times this information is "in someones head”. In which case we can capture the information and document in an “As-Built” diagram.

Assess and document your current customer interaction processes and experiences.

Todays customers are expecting to have a seamless experience, regardless of the type or sequence of their interactions with your business. Whether this starts via a web search or your web site, or opening a web chat discussion, or placing a call to your call center. Visually capturing your customers journey and call flows through these channels has several significant benefits.

Most contact centers solutions will have a multitude of usage reports, statistics and call data that can be very helpful in evaluating your operational performance. However, by leveraging the intellectual capital gained from visualizing your customers interaction journey, you can build a more strategic call flow design and differentiate the experience for your customers.

Management can also be more precise on how and where to invest resources in the channels that match your customer service expectations.

Outline multiple service options and provide vendor agnostic snapshot assessment.

Having completed the earlier steps, we will consolidate and document a detailed Requirements Definition that captures your current and future service and solution specifications.

In addition, we will provide an executive summary of alternative approaches (On-Site, Cloud or Hybrid) and a short list of best fit solution and service providers that match your business model and requirements. A preliminary 5-year Total Cost of Operation will be outlined for each service. We can work with you and make recommendations for selection or for identifying candidates for an RFP.

Coordinate and manage RFP process, evaluations, TCO comparisons and selection.

Steinmetz Services and Consulting can manage the process of preparing your specific business requirements and submitting a Request For Proposal (RFP) to your identified prime service candidates on your behalf. We will assimilate all the responses, coordinated vendor demonstration and Q&A sessions, prepare a summary of the proposal services and provide 5 year Total Cost of Operations comparison.

We can also compare purchase and service agreements to make sure you are getting competitive service and support.

Organize and manage all the steps associated with a successful Unified Communication Solution for your company.

The task of organizing and managing all the steps associated with a successful Unified Communication solution for your company is a complicated process. A typical project plan could include the proper management and timing of these services:

1. Installation of proper broadband internet services.

2. Number porting scheduling and old service cancellations.

3. System design, development, testing and installation.

4. Marketing and CRM systems integration design, development, installation and testing.

5. Training plans for users and administrators.Service “Cutover” timing and execution, with fall-back options.