VoIPstudio recently conducted a survey of its customers known to have come from competitors. The company’s goal, to find out what caused customers to make the switch in the first place. I’m told, the survey confirmed many of the VoIP providers’ assumptions by Rob Seymour, Marketing Director, VoIPstudio.
He shared with me in an interview, pricing was a ‘Major cause for cancelation and migration over to VoIPstudio.’ Seymour added, the company identified these customers by their numbers which VoIPstudio ported over from previous service providers like RingCentral, British Telecom, and Vonage.
One of the most damming selling points of the VoIP phone solution is that it doesn’t have any premium features. Features like unlimited call recording and reception consoles are standard with each deployment. VoIPstudio’s survey further showed two-thirds of respondents felt the price they paid with other vendors was “More than they expected to pay.” One third said the ‘out-of-the-box’ features they got with a standard package lacked in useful functionalities.
“This is very significant and speaks volumes about the way many service providers behave. They often have deliberately complex and opaque pricing plans. We feel that these ‘sharp practices’ in pricing amount to an endemic in the industry and cast us all in a bad light”
When asked why they canceled service with previous service providers, 75 percent said price, 50 percent said the quality of service, and 22 percent cited a lack of support. Sixty-five percent of participants said the price they paid did not match the service expectations they had before signing a contract. A mere 35 percent said it did.
Thirty-five percent of customers said they got tied into a ‘minimum’ contract period, and 65 percent said they were not. Here’s a key part of the survey, which highlights a fundamental obstacle, according to Seymour. He believes other service providers do not extend many features that should appear in a standard package, including:
- Call recording – 22.58 percent
- Call monitoring – 29.03 percent
- Analytics – 29.03 percent
- CRM integrations – 9.68 percent
- 24/7 tech support – 32.26 percent
- SLA – 12.9 percent
Nearly half of those surveyed chose ‘None of the above,’ indicating they did not have any of these features included with previous vendor packages. Contrast this with VoIPstudio, which has a clear and rather aggressive pricing structure.
“We want to make this even clearer with our new pricing model. Pay-as-you-go remains, but we’re doing away with the current national/ international plans to offer international calling plans to everyone with our new 2,000-minute bundle”
Seymour told me, instead of choosing between PAYG, the company’s new national plan includes 2,000 free minutes to a single country. VoIPstudios’ new international plan extends 2,000 free minutes to 40+ countries. “We’ll soon offer PAYG and ‘2K bundles.’ Our old international plan will go for a reduced cost, and we hope this makes things even clearer and provides more flexibility for clients because they aren’t restricted to calling a single country.”
It is unclear what any of these changes might mean in terms of numbers, but one can only look at the company’s old pricing structure and make some assumptions. VoIPstudios’ old pricing structure started at £3.99 a month for a pay-as-you-go plan, and users paid £9.99 for national plans. International calling plans used to be £19.99.
