Do you understand what your customers are trying to accomplish?

I have just spent the past 3 weeks working with my firewall vendor’s technical support trying to extend our corporate VoIP network to our branch offices.  It was suppose to be a simple thing and only require a few clicks of the mouse…

Let me start by saying a VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) phone system is a wonderful solution to expand the corporate phone system into branch offices and finally connect corporate associates with branch associates. This helps with productivity as call groups can be rerouted without a lot of hassle and phone messaging systems can usually be integrated with e-mail messaging systems, such as Microsoft Exchange. The best thing is technology prices have made a VoIP solution affordable for the SMB.

The challenge is that it does require a higher degree of technical skill to handle a multi-site solution and making some things work can be very tricky. Although many people claim maintaining a VoIP phone system is usually less maintenance, this is not entirely true. The adds, moves, and changes are much easier – in fact just about anyone can be trained to do this. It is the expansions that can get you stuck in the mud. Additionally, several different vendors must often be involved, because a VoIP phone system lives on top of several other layers. This is not a bad thing, but just a simple fact to be aware of.

After spending a little while on the phone with our vendor support for the VoIP phone system, we quickly came to the conclusion there were some configuration issues in our firewall routing – the phones couldn’t talk to each other. The strangest thing was we could place all calls from each branch office back to corporate, but the branch offices could not talk with one another without dialing an outside line.

After working almost 3 weeks with the firewall vendor’s technical support, the engineer stops today and asks us why we didn’t want to configure it another way versus what we were trying to do? I stopped dead in my tracks and put my head in my hand. Why didn’t I think of this 2 weeks ago? More importantly why didn’t he recommend this 2 weeks ago when we were beating our heads against the wall fruitlessly attempting to make a certain configuration work?

Here are the lessons I took away from all of this: Flip the problem on its side and look at it differently, ask other exports for their insight, and don’t be afraid to ask, “What are you trying to accomplish?’ By asking the right questions up front in your problem-solving session or sales call with a customer — you might just save you and your customer a lot of time and be the hero!