How should I evaluate my Credit Union Telecom Provider?

Credit Union telecom provider

Key Criteria for Credit Union Telecom Providers

If you are happy paying too much for your big named telecom circuits and getting lousy support, poor speed or quality, and ancient technology – this post is not for you.  If however, you are looking at better ways to create resilient and high performance data communication solutions that enable your employees to efficiently and reliably work – than read on.

There are five key criteria that Credit Unions should use to evaluate their telecom providers. These include:Credit Union telecom provider

  • Quality
  • Service
  • Reliability
  • Flexibility and Scalability
  • Security

Quality

As you look for managed Credit Union technology providers –  quality should play a big role in the selection process, telecommunication (Telecom) provider quality must drive your selection as communications plays a huge role in providing services to your users both internal and external.   Quality is a combination of speed, latency, and jitter.  Establishing SLA’s and looking for performance standards is key to making sure you are comparing apples to apples.

With the deregulation of the Telecom service providers many private or local providers now offer these services making quality very regional.  While you may be pushed to select a low cost carrier many times you get what you pay for and you must be prepared for the consequences of that choice.  Customer service, response and repair time may be lacking and may not meet your internal service quality requirements.

Service

Maintaining member satisfaction is crucial in the Credit Union industry with even a few negative experiences having a lasting impression so your telecom service providers plays a major role in meeting member expectations.  With this in mind service should be a primary factor in your selection, poor customer service has forced this writer to question why a certain provider was selected more time than I can relate.  Have them explain their steps used to provide the best experience possible.  Your provider should be able to demonstrate through monitoring – the ability to real-time know when a circuit is down, escalate appropriately, dispatch technicians efficiently and reroute your traffic to a backup network if needed.

Reliability

Your telecom provider should help you grow your business, not slow it.  Many times too few questions are asked about reliability until it is too late and have an outage and a sub-par resolution.  All telecom providers may have outages due to weather or other unforeseen circumstances with the ability to repair your service while minimizing business impact provides the differences between the multiple services available.  Ask the providers if they own their own network or lease it from others, their escalation procedures and if you can expect a live person to answer when you call in a trouble.  It is most likely that the local loop provider will be the same supplier for service delivery to your site since the infrastructure is already in place with the local loop provider actually responsible for that delivery and the maintenance of their infrastructure.

Flexibility and Scalability

Flexibility and scalability should also be considered, be wary of a provider that cannot offer flexibility .  Look for a provider that allows for upgrades, adding services or new products incrementally as your organization grows and has a history of upgrading their network and expanding their product set offering.  A couple of key things to look for:

  • Ability to move locations during your contract without penalty
  • Use of Ethernet based products (EVPLS, Fiber, etc.) NOT Legacy products (T1s, T3s, Sonnet etc.)
  • Avoid use of proprietary routers – use something standard like Cisco, Juniper, etc.

Security

Ensuring that your provider can meet your regulatory requirements including encryption, password management, router management, monitoring, IDS or IPS services and even DDOS solutions is key.  Putting in a new network that has default router passwords, no encryption, and no active security controls is a recipe for huge data loss or hacking problems.

Finally, with any selection of outsourced services, ask for references from peers and colleagues.  Your provider will just give you people that like them…not the real story.  This should always be part of any vendor selection process and any business worthy of your business will hand over a list of customers for you to contact and discuss their actual experiences.

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