I could come on here and ask for technical help with our VOIP problem but instead I’m really asking about how to deal wtih this vendor.
We had a piece of hardware that was out of warranty that kept rebooting itself. I contacted our vendor who told me it was out of warranty and paid them a fee to come out here and look at it, and basically plug it into a different port.
It took 20 days to get them out there.
And it didnt work…still the system rebooted.
So I callled them and they quoted me on a package including updating our software package and adding tech support. I agreed, begrudgingly, beucase no other Avaya resellers were getting back to me quick enough (the phones rebooting was a huge problem)
They came and did the install, and since the install our Visual Voicemail doesn’t work. This is how all of our staff is trained on voicemail.
Tier one support tried to fix it but couldnt. I asked them to escalate it and have told to “be patient” for the past week.
What the heck am I supposed to do with these people?
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This is why I took an entire year to learn everything I could about voip systems/telephony and roll out asterisk.
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edgrauel
(Ed Grauel)
3
Get a new vendor. There are probably dozens in your area, I’m sure one of them would be happy to take your business at the same price or less.
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You said you added technical support via contract in your original post. What is the service level agreement on that? Are there any penalties for not making these agreements?
Ultimately, you need a more reliable vendor who knows their stuff. Avaya has a good phone system and it’s pretty easy to administer but when hardware flakes that’s a pain.
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So yeah the problem at this point with finding a new vendor is that we just signed a new contract with this one. I will have to look into the service level agreements.
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If they cannot respond in a timely fashion then the contract is null and void, especially for a mission critical system like the phones. Depending on the size of the contract you may want to consider having legal on standby, however, sometimes just threatening termination of a contract is sufficient to get some things happening.
Or, if you know them well enough contact the “Powers That Be” at that organization and see about getting your issue prioritized.
If your not under contract, look into other options. There is no reason it should take 20 days to get a tech out when it’s a paid visit. If you are under contract and can’t break it, just make sure they know that if they continue to give you poor service you will not be renewing that contract later on.
There should be a clause on SLA - if they don’t respond in a certain amount of time, there should be repercussions, such as the contract being null - and reverting to month to month.
Send 'em packing.
Find someone else. There are plenty of options out there.
Honestly it sounds, from what you describe, like a fly-by-night outfit. I wouldn’t give them another moment of time or another penny of my money.
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Yes, the SLAs will be everything here. You should not need a service contract for VoIP support in general. You can just call a vendor to come help. This is one of the reasons that we warn against products like Cisco, Avaya, etc. where you basically have no choice but to use an Avaya partner - they have you hostage. It’s one of the massive risks of those systems that people rarely talk about. When you are in NYC and have a hundred Avaya partners vying for your business, it’s an open marketplace and the risk is essentially zero. When you have one or none, you are at their mercy for pricing, SLA, etc.
Open systems that any vendor can support are not popular with resellers because they don’t earn as much money so sales people will never push them - they don’t have that big “lock in” value that a reseller looks for. But for you, the end users, the openness of a VoIP platform is your guarantee that you can always find a competitive company to support you. You are never locked in against your will.
In your case here, it sounds like replacing the Avaya is the way to go. If it is having issues and you don’t have a great support ecosystem locally you need to get away from that product. No matter how good it is or how well it meets your technical needs, it doesn’t appear to meet the basic business needs (affordable, supportable and reliable.)
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Actually, no, it’s unlikely that there is such a clause unless the OP wrote the SLA agreement. SLAs exist to protect the vendor, not the customer. Unless customers demand it, an SLA will rarely have any strong language to allow for separation. This is why I warn IT people against looking for SLAs. They are extremely dangerous. This is how ISPs burn IT all the time. It’s common for IT folks to assume that SLA means a guarantee of service. Often they only service to limit the liability of the vendor.
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That’s not how contracts work, especially not contracts with an SLA. The purpose of an SLA to a vendor is to have documentation that explicitly stops any expectation of “timely fashion” so that you can’t even argue that such response was implied (which it isn’t, but just in case anyone tried it.) Unless you get a contract that defines what a timely fashion is, there is no intrinsic concept of such that causes contracts to otherwise cease.
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Good points all.
Interesting stuff to think about, SAM… the idea of replacing the Avaya equipment hadn’t crossed my mind as we are still on a lease but in this case it is true that the hardware is only as good as its support. I can do some of the work myself in terms of routine configuration/maintenance but I’m not saavy enough to troubleshoot complex issues.
george1421
(George1421)
14
Right here is the point at where they should have been dumped as a non-reputable company (I understand the pressures the OP was under with a unstable phone system). They where paid to perform a service/repair. Their service was ineffective so they sold them a maintenance contract to resolve the issue.
As for the SLAs, unless the OP had a legal department on their side look at the contract, the service contract is crafted to be for the benefit of the service provider not the customer. Scott is spot on in his assessment.
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george1421
(George1421)
15
What, this hardware is still under a leases agreement but it is out of warranty? This is a very strange situation.
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I’ve often found it to be true that in cases of support problems, alternative options often outperform sticking with what you have. When you are stuck still paying the support it is exceptionally hard to see the “throwing good money after bad” scenario that is playing out. But chances are, for less than the cost of the existing support contract, you could probably replace the entire system with something newer, more robust and better supported! 
I agree, that that could be the case had not occurred to me when I originally posted. I assumed that it was paid for and just out of support. Might be a third party hardware lease, though.
Yes, this should have been a red flag. They failed to do good work and made more money for having done so. For all we know, they intentionally didn’t fix the issue in order to elicit a larger, more binding contractual situation. All we know about them from the first engagement is that they charged for work that they couldn’t do. While that alone doesn’t mean we should dump them, it does mean that we don’t have a good basis for a larger engagement. If it was just one factor after a string of good interactions, it would just be a blip to overlook. But as the only thing to work from, it is very bad.
That’s why we have a corporate attorney. And even having one, we almost exclusively opt for “best effort” support where all parties have a reasonable ability to walk away at any time and everyone has a stake in working towards continuously maintaining a healthy relationship.
And because of it - our relationships are normally in decades, not months or years. Everyone is in it to win it.
Briefly it was under lease but not warranty, now it is back under warranty.
