Welcome To Our Blog!
If you’ve made it this far, you may be an Avaya Cloud Office (ACO) or RingCentral (RC) subscriber wondering what we’re all about!
No matter how you got here—we’re happy to have you!
While our goal of this blog going forward will be to deep-dive narrow ACO and RC topics, this intro post aims to answer one question:
What Does Cross + Dot Do Differently—And Why Choose Us?
If you’ve spent any time around our site, you likely already know a bit about what our Cloud Support Team does on the daily.
For those (very) new here, our Four CORE Services are as follows:
(1) Design + Support
(2) Admin + User Training
(3) Pro Greetings
(4) Implementation
While the goal here is not to deep-dive what we do across all these areas (that would quickly turn a blog into an essay, and you can always see our breakdown in Services), we do at minimum want to highlight how we stand out—proudly, we might add—against non-dedicated, direct support.
Let’s begin by stacking side-by-side the two typical business scenarios we see in onboarding:
The Ultra-Basic Setup:
On one hand, some companies join the platform with only a simple 1-number-1-flow setup, and require next to nothing to get going in terms of design (though always more than is realized). In our experience, these (typically smaller) companies have users and call flow configured in the beginning, and only occasionally require Design + Support Services (or Install Services) post-implementation.
Those in this category may be better suited to take advantage of our Pro Greeting Services (for those wanting a unified voice across company/user lines) or our Training Services (for teams onboarding or needing refreshers for new admins or end-users joining the team)—and to reach out for design or support as needed.
But this is not what we typically see across the board.
The Norm:
Most companies onboard with more dynamic needs; at minimum, clients tend to come to the platform with a handful of company numbers (and/or User DIDs) and require more than a single unilateral call flow.
Whether every day or seasonal routing (e.g., holidays and inclement weather) or multi-site/multi-number routing (e.g., different branches or services), these very common scenarios simply have more going on and benefit more from the array of services.
That said, our experience has taught us one critical takeaway:
As a rule, unless paying Avaya or RingCentral enterprise costs for white-glove service, companies (especially those in this latter category) are set up for failure in the very beginning when onboarding—and this one truth amplifies the place for our Dedicated Support on all fronts.
What we mean is that in the face of scope of work limitations:
(1) New builds are inadequately designed and lack precision.
(2) Admins are improperly trained on making changes in the Admin Portal.
(3) Users are not trained at all or are trained too generically.
(4) Company greetings are without personalization, left on system default.
And in our experience, these gaps in delivery tend to result, at best, in frustration and confusion, and at worst, in resentment, distaste, or in outright cancellation.
Our Mission At Cross + Dot Is To Prevent These Spirals!
New Subscribers:
Let’s first put things into perspective: Avaya and RingCentral have two implementation offerings applicable to small-to-medium businesses (and they’re effectively the exact same between the two).
(1) Self-Guided (i.e., Basic): No Extra Cost
For Basic installs, the customer does the heavy lifting, and build work is not completed for clients. Here access to a human resource is restricted to (limited) consultation, and the idea here is that (generic) training sessions and digital documentation will suffice for admins to do design and porting work themselves.
In some cases, this approach is sufficient; for the rest, however, this simply does not work well, as customers find themselves under-designed and under-trained. And company admins, on top of their typical work load, almost always don’t have the time to learn the platform comprehensively, never mind such to train their entire team on the platform.
So what’s the alternative?
(2) Paid (Intermediate Level—i.e., Basic Plus): $800 USD
The next tier of implementation via Avaya and RingCentral, up from the Self-Guided Install, is what is referred to as the Basic Plus Install (Basic+). Priced the same (with nearly the exact same scope of work), this approach does provide a better experience for customers, but in our experience can be priced high—especially for head counts under 5—and still presents limitations that impact client experience.
Yes, on this approach a new subscriber gets a “dedicated” resource to complete build work, porting, and provide training (including both admin and end-user). And no doubt this is more white-glove than the former. But design and programming on this approach are limited to 1 site/branch, and entirely excludes professional greetings (an angle painfully and too-often overlooked), and training is still generic. And any additional sites require secondary Basic+ packaging (if not a higher-tiered enterprise implementation, depending on the site count).
Our Difference:
Serving as your Certified Delivery Partners to provide our Install Services—including our entire suite of services (Design, Training, Porting, and Post-Go-Live Support)—our goal is to pick up where Avaya and RingCentral leave off.
We work with your team to ensure that your configuration requirements are met and that your team (including admins and end-users) is comfortable before we complete the implementation.
The Cross + Dot Team Does All The (Virtual) Heavy-Lifting!
And if we miss something, we waste no time to get things set properly; we will never leave your team hanging!
More generally, we understand—from painful experience—how easily one “small” gap in design or training can cause a nightmare, which is why precision across all of our work is so critically important to us.
Already Existing Subscribers:
So then what about post-install? Again let’s put things into perspective:
When Avaya or RingCentral “completes” an implementation, a subscriber’s account is transitioned to the respective support teams (i.e., Day 2). Here is where the cracks begin to show.
Our background being rooted in Implementation, we have experienced far too many horror stories of customers deemed “ready” to transition, whom had to return to Support for secondary design owing to improper requirement probing (but also, to be fair, at times simply from customers only learning only after what their team needs, with no “blame” on either side). Of course, this similarly applies to training, with subscribers too often returning because of admin or end-user knowledge gaps.
And for a team to receive re-design services, not only can high costs be involved to re-engage Delivery, getting this done in a timely manner can present its own challenges. And these same challenges apply to refresher training (never mind its generic nature). And while RingCentral does thankfully have more flexible calling hours for support, Avaya, on the other hand, does not, meaning if a challenge occurs throughout the night, a team could be left without proper recourse.
Our Difference:
When challenges pop up, we provide dedicated Design + Support Services. We jump in to resolve challenges promptly (if not immediately), and in the face of constant organizational restructuring, you don’t have to worry about working with a new team member who knows nothing of your account’s background (or, dare we say, the platform generally). And in the same way, when there’s an after-the-fact knowledge gap, we provide our curated (and fairly-priced) Admin + User Training Services to quickly help teams get back on their feet (see our Training Demos to learn more).
And to add to this, once clients learn the staggering difference in quality, they often take advantage of our Professional Greeting Services (see our Greeting Demos), as companies love the way this service provides a (public) polish to their company auto-attendants (i.e., IVR menus) and general (and/or user) mailboxes. Our sets of custom greetings are entirely unmatched by default system messaging—and, concurrently, saves the work of finding someone on the team to manually record.
In The End, We Cross Our T’s and Dot Our I’s—and It Shows!
We pride ourselves on the strong business relationships we build. Our team may be small (and mighty), but clients love our dedication to top-tier customer service and precision, and they trust and rely on us for it: A trust we handle with great delicacy!
