Why not make use of the free trial of business VoIP if it’s offered without any commitment?
Not having to make a big commitment in the form of multiyear contracts is a significant benefit of upgrading to VoIP from conventional phone plans.
Businesses are free to switch vendors, reduce the number of seats or pay for fewer features if their requirements change. It is an especially valuable feature in an industry that is continuously changing and competition is forcing vendors to reduce prices or offer better features to gain/retain customers.
Try Before You Buy
Since an organization is not locked to a particular vendor, it might seem superfluous to have a trial period for testing VoIP services. After all, the business can switch to someone else if their needs are not met or the price is too expensive.
However, that can still be a tiresome process – especially for organizations that depend on voice communication for day to day workflows. It means work might have to stop as they switch vendors, change configuration settings, or otherwise interrupt business processes.
Quite a few vendors offer some sort of free trial – whether it is a few days, weeks, or even a month. The trial can be useful to a business for many reasons:
- Test Quality – Quite often it is not easy to verify the audio quality of calls on VoIP, since a part of it depends upon the network speeds, QoS settings etc. This free trial allows organizations to check the quality of voice calls in a production environment and not just through software testing.
- Bugs or Problems – Sometimes the particular configuration of the data network may cause conflicts with the hosted VoIP service. For instance, the company might find that their existing IP handsets may not work very well with the new service. Generally changing a few settings will resolve issues, but it is better to find and fix them beforehand.
- Check Internet Speeds and Bandwidth – Not all organizations are prepared for the extra traffic load introduced by VoIP. Once they start using the service, the company may find that they need more bandwidth or faster speeds to ensure quality. Any such hiccups can be identified and fixed during the free trial, so the business is not wasting time after deployment.
In the worst-case scenario, the business might have to switch to a different vendor if they find that their requirements are not met or unsolvable problems arise.
By finding these issues during the trial, the company has not wasted any money in paying for a service they can’t use.
Business VoIP Free Trial: What’s the Catch?
Being able to evaluate a service before purchasing it is a great idea but it can also be misused by unscrupulous vendors.
While it is the industry standard to offer a free trial – however short it may be – it is also common practice for vendors to request credit card information that is kept on file.
In many cases, you can’t try out the service without providing some sort of payment data.
This is supposed to make the process of purchasing hosted VoIP services easier for companies since if their card information is already on file, they can simply continue using the service past the trial period.
Unfortunately some providers will automatically charge the credit card once the free trial ends unless the organization confirms that they are canceling well beforehand. This means a lot of companies end up paying for a couple of months of service even if they had no intention of doing so.
