Brian Nichols | Host, CX Without the BS

You sign the quote. The phones go live. Then the first bill shows up, and it's a lot bigger than the number you agreed to.

If that's happened to you, you're not alone, and according to my guest, it's not an accident.

Stephen Howard has been in telecom since, as he likes to say, "the turn of the century." He started at SBC Global in Indiana when AT&T was still a long distance company and businesses were moving from dial-up to DSL. Since then he's sold direct, built channels, and been part of close to 25 mergers and acquisitions.

Full disclosure: Stephen and I work together at the day job, so we talk about this stuff every day. I wanted to get it on the record.

At the end of every episode I ask my guests for the biggest piece of BS in the industry. Almost everybody says AI. Stephen didn't.

Listen to the full episode: Why UCaaS Quotes NEVER Match the Bill

The Quote Never Matches the Bill

Here's how Stephen put it: whenever a customer gets a quote from a provider, "and then they get their first bill, they don't match."

And not by a little. In his words, it's "total BS that you are, you know, charged 25 to 35% more than what you were quoted." Worse, "now you're locked into a long term agreement and you have no repercussion."

He didn't hide how he feels about it: "It angers me, even just saying that."

What I loved about his answer is that it isn't a buzzword. It's not a shiny feature. It's just how things have always been done, and that's exactly why nobody questions it.

Free Hardware Should Make Your Spidey Senses Tingle

Stephen's first red flag is price, especially the deal that looks too good.

If somebody is giving you hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment to become a customer, his take is simple: "it doesn't take an MBA to realize that that's not a sustainable model."

(My first reaction on the show was, "They like me. They really like me." They don't.)

He explained why some big providers do it anyway. They answer to a board and shareholders, and "the metric that they're going off of is, you know, hey, how many active customers do I have? It's not really about a profitability number."

So the question to ask is the one he asks: "why am I getting such a great deal, and is this going to be a supportable product?"

Because the cheap deal has a cost somewhere. If you're sitting on hold for hours when something breaks, that's your business paying for it. Stephen's advice is to "look past the second and third derivatives of what that price decision does to your organization."

The $700 Auto Attendant

This was the story from the episode that stuck with me.

Stephen worked with a county government that wouldn't update its auto attendant to tell citizens the courthouse would be closed for the holidays. The reason? It "would cost them about $700 to do that."

They had POTS lines and a premise-based phone system. Changing the greeting meant dispatching a tech, about $350 the Tuesday before Thanksgiving and another $350 the Monday after.

So they skipped it. As Stephen described their thinking: "Hopefully our citizens know, and that's not acceptable."

He shared another one. An organization had someone on its IT team dedicated to managing the phone system, handling 10 to 12 service tickets a day. Imagine giving that person their day back.

His question for any buyer who went with the lowest price or brought everything in-house: "is it worth paying a little bit more money to get some time back from my employees?"

Don't Forget the Customer's Customer

Every one of those decisions lands on somebody else, the person calling in.

I told a story on the show about a plumbing issue at my house. I called one company and got a voicemail bot that didn't work. I hung up, went back to Google, and called the next company on the list. They answered live and were at my house the next morning.

That was the whole decision. Not price. Not reviews. Who picked up.

Stephen pointed out this is an old problem: "That's how we ended up with AAA exterminating, right?" If the first company in the phone book didn't answer, you called the next one.

The questions he wants businesses asking are about effort: "How many prompts do we want them to experience? How much work do we want to have them put in before they actually are able to get what they called us for?"

What Mergers Do to Your Customers

Stephen has lived through a lot of acquisitions, on both sides. When I asked what makes a good one, he boiled it down: "the biggest piece comes down to communication."

That goes for employees and for customers, and for both companies' customers. Even the acquiring company's customers start to worry. Is this company about to take its focus off me?

His practical advice is one of the most underrated things I've heard on the show. Use the phone system itself to communicate. "You can start to use your auto attendants, your music on hold," to point customers to the plan, whether that's a website, a press release, or an account manager.

The goal is one version of the story. In his words: "Where is the truth sitting, so that they don't have their own truth?"

That also means one voice. Stephen said "there should not be a different message being sent out from all of your employees," and that folding a new company in can start with something as simple as a familiar voice on both phone systems.

The Recording Nobody Wanted to Change

Here's the hardest example he shared.

He worked with a business that didn't want to change its auto attendant recording because it was recorded by someone who had passed away five years earlier. As he put it, "nobody wants to have those conversations."

He understood why. But it wasn't serving the business, and every caller heard it first.

His bigger point is that customer experience starts with the very first sound. "What's the first thing they hear? Is it going to be a ring in their ear? Is it going to be music on hold, or is it going to be a person greeting them?"

And his fix is about as simple as it gets: "Sometimes you have to pick up the phone and call and see how it feels on the other side, versus just looking at it as a diagram."

My Take

An old sales mentor of mine used to say people treat phone service like toothpaste and soap. Just another commodity on the list. Check, check, check.

I think that's the trap. We commoditized it in our own heads, and then we stopped asking questions.

Before you sign your next phone or contact center contract, ask:

• Will the first invoice match this quote? If not, what's the gap and why?
• If the deal includes "free" hardware or deep discounts, what's paying for it?
• What does it cost, in dollars and in time, every time we need to change a greeting or a call flow?
• How long is the term, and what happens if the service doesn't live up to the pitch?
• When did someone last call our own main number and listen like a customer?

If you can't answer those, you might be headed for a bill you didn't expect.

Listen to the Full Episode

Stephen and I cover a lot more, including how advisors can stand out by asking the questions other advisors skip, and how employees can actually help during an acquisition instead of fighting it.

Listen to Stephen Howard on CX Without the BS

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-Brian