Under The Hood – Fun With VoIP

AV isn’t the only thing driving enterprise customers nutty.   VoIP is just as fun.   At The Farm, we pride ourselves as being on the tip of the spear with new technology and services.   We like to be the test bed for our factories,  trying new CRM, communications, Live Chat Support,  and other new products out on our smaller company so we can be a trusted adviser to the mammoth factories we represent as well our trusted resller partners .   We want to be the early adopters, and really be on the cutting edge.  Being on the tip of the spear isn’t always fun.

Our recent joys with phones are one of those less fun times.   We started with a traditional Analog PBX years ago.   Converted to digital before it was cool.   Then we built our own VoIP server on a Linux box in around 2007.   That was awesome,  but when we had internet issues,  it was less than awesome.  So we bundled up our VoIP instance and put it on the Amazon Cloud  (AWS).  Once again,  early adoption.   This served us well for many years….but the hack attempts became more frequent and more devious…and we decided to move to something “off the shelf” instead of our own custom VoIP.

 But off the shelf,  like RingCentral or 8×8 wasn’t cool enough for us.   We wanted to be ahead of the curve.

 After a mountain of research, we landed on a hot new product from Amazon called AWS CONNECT.   This is a cloud-based call center software that is amazing.   It is just flat out awesome, except the part where we can’t seem to talk to our customers without the question “What?”.

We tested for weeks and weeks before deploying and decommissioning the old system.  We thought we had this thing nailed, but as many of you have come to find out, we didn’t have it nailed.

 So this call center software is what the big boys use….but the big boys have big boy IT teams…and we have John and Jacob.  We can hold our own in the network world, but maybe not enough to do this right.

 So any intermittent call quality issues you may experience with The Farm are being worked on as we must make this work.  And as we attempt to rectify our issues with AWS Connect, we are actively testing alternative web-based solutions to serve you better as we continue to grow.  Right now we are leaning towards RingCentral as our fallback position.

 We just want to make sure our valued partners know that although Voice-Phone usage continues to shrink in the US, we know it is a vital part of what a rep firm provides.   Access to us right now in real time.  Answers immediately.

 We appreciate your patience and understanding.