What’s not a problem with VoIP

This time we want to wrap up our discussion of the poll of users who were not happy with their VoIP implementations. Last time we identified the top reasons for dissatisfaction – but it’s also useful to know what did not show up as being a problem.

Clearly, applications were not a problem. The choice, “Applications were difficult to implement,” was chosen by only 16% of the respondents. Actually, this is not surprising. If the users were having problems getting the VoIP implementation up and running in the first place, they probably never made it to the stage of implementing applications.

Three additional choices also were not strong factors, with each being chosen by less than 30% of the respondents. “Transition from traditional telephony more difficult than anticipated” scored the second to the lowest, with only 16% finding this to be a problem.

The next two responses tied with about 27% finding them to be problems. Equipment manufacturers can feel pretty good about the first of these, “Equipment was unreliable.” So the problem seems to be more with managing the equipment than with the equipment itself.

The other response with only 27% was “Move to VoIP was dictated by management that didn’t understand the problems.” This is the really good news. The fear with any new technology is that the hype, rather than the reality, gets used in a top-down selling environment. Perhaps one of the major inhibitors – lack of budget – is playing more strongly here and performing an effective counterbalance.

One final comment. We asked about the companies that people were dissatisfied with – and we did not find a “stinker.” In fact, the percentage of people dissatisfied with a given company tended to mirror the market shares for each of the companies.