sundance-communications.com/forum Forums TDM Business Telephone Systems Samsung Telephones & Systems Creating a mail box for directions/ hours

RUSSOPOWER I am not an expert on your Samsung system but I do know what you are attempting to accomplish. One of my customers is a popular golf course that is always providing driving directions from the airport to their location. What I did for them was record the directions in an info mailbox. When the caller requests the directions the golf staff says certainly then presses one single button on the phone and hangs up. The caller hears the directions in a very professional and deliberate manner. At the end of the message the caller (if they are still on the line) is automatically transferred to the pro shop.

I think this is what you are after.

Putting this together for you is something your dealer can do. You could do this yourself if you were an expert on your system but you are not, you are an end user. The area of programming you would need to be in to accomplish this task is just a few keystrokes away from completely defaulting your system and numerous other accidental changes.

Your dealer can do this for you for the price of a service call. If the man hours saved by having this done plus the professional impression you will give to your callers don't exceed the price of the service call then possibly your desire to do this isn't really all that important.

One last point. If your dealer had known this was valuable during install he or she would have done it then, but if you didn't inform him/her how could they know.

I understand all of your points. We have run into problems with the dealer that set up our system. We don't think it is right for a dealer to charge you to come pick up a phone that went bad, fix it under warranty and then charge you to bring it back to you. That is a service that they should provide you do to the fact that you just spent 10's of thousads of dollars with them. Also now I want to use a different dealer. They are going to charge me an arm and a leg to figure out how the other dealer set it up to understand what we need. I have been through this already and that is why I am so upset and seeking help in these chat rooms. We sell power equipment. We are one of the largest if not the largest outdoor power equipment dealer. We did not get that way by charging someone every dime we could just to make some money. We have the service that people expect with prices people can afford. If someone comes and asks us how to do something we take the time to show them. We don't say that is going to be $75.00 to tell you how to do that. If that is the way phone dealers are then maybe we need to go back to tin cans and a roll of string!!!

OK, Since I want to keep things straight in my head and not make any errors I would appreciate it if you would send me what you consider to be an arm and a leg in a Private Message.

You are in Chicago and I'm sure there are more than just 2 Samsung dealers in Chicago.

If you choose to ignore my request I fully understand because as I said previously I haven't a clue when it comes to Samsung equipment.

A Compliment to You:

I looked at your website and I am very impressed.
Did you do it yourself?

I have done alot of it myself. We just changed over programs and have only a few items up there.

Samsung offers a five year warrenty on parts which we as a company give the customer 2 years on the labor to replace anything that goes bad. After that two years they would have to pay for a site visit to fix or replace a bad part but the hardware itself would still be covered up to 5 years from the install. You have to understand too Russ that phone guys have to eat too. If we did everything for free then none of us would be in business. Our time, travel expenses, insurance etc. all costs money. We do give some leway though after a new install for "tweaking" usually 2 months of free service changes on long as they don't abuse it. I'm sorry you had a bad experience with your dealer, not all dealers are good and Samsung should be made aware of your bad experience.

Russopower,

I also must respond to your e-mail. Being in the telephone industry is not as easy as most people think. With the new technologies we encounter we must always stay on top of new training that is required for us to remain business. Samsung certified technicians here on this board must attend courses provided by Samsung, there are times we must travel to attend these classes at our own expense. Like Benb mentionned phone guys must eat too. Here we offer a month's free of changes after the original date of install or a maintenance contract for parts and labor is also offered to every customer. I believe that is something you should check into as you search for another dealer.

Russopower,

As benb stated Samsung offers a 5 year warranty. We also provide labor for 2 years. One thing that we go a little over on is the free programming changes after an initial install. We give 90 days or 8 hours onsite including travel time whichever comes first.

"They are going to charge me an arm and a leg to figure out how the other dealer set it up to understand what we need."

It takes a lot of time to go through all the existing programming to figure out how someone else has your system working. There are so many different ways to accomplish a task in programming and no 2 people think alike. Like Grider I would also like to know what an arm costs these days if you would PM me.

Training, workers comp, general liability, vehicle Insurance, mileage for personal vehicles
Travel Expense!!!! It costs a lot of money to be in a support based industry.
I have created a hypothetical example for trips below that is fairly realistic.

Here in NE Florida a trip could range from .75 hours to 1.5 hours depending on the time of day. If you run those numbers you will be amazed! Example, in an 8 hour day at .75 hours trip time with an average of 3 service calls (we also service data networks) that equates to 2.25 hours of travel per day. At $75 per hour (hypothetical) for the trip charge, the total for a single day is $168.75, a week $843.75, and a year it is $43,875 per tech.

Can you afford to throw that away? I can't and neither can anyone else in the support business. Pay as you go support is a break even business at best. Once I ran those numbers the first time I changed our support contracts so they don't include travel time.

Not trying to beat you up, just my 2 cents worth.

Oh yea and out of state/area training. Costs a lot in hotel, car rentals, and airline tickets plus the lost time in the field.

I'm sure there is a Samsung dealer in your area that can help you.

I want to chime in as well, I have to side with Russo.

I have no problem with a company/person earning a decent and good living for profession that definitely takes skill.

However, I have to take exception with the thought that 'users' are not capable of understanding a phone system unless they are a 'dealer'.

I've spent over 15 years in broadcasting and have worked with phone systems from old ITT & WE 1A2 systems to more current Mitel, Toshiba, Lucent, and now Samsung.

I am no 'dealer' but I darn well know my way around a phone system and can program most systems from scratch and I've never been and never will be a phone system dealer.

I personally find it to be rather offending when there is the mindset that an end user is too dumb to understand current phone system technology.

To use Russo's analogy of a car when you buy a car you get manuals and documentation with it, sure it's not a service manual, but if you want to buy a service manual you can. You can buy aftermarket documentation, and all sorts of resources are available in the public domain and sure if you 'chip' your engine you will likely void the warranty and that is own your nickel!

But on the flip side, if you change the oil yourself as scheduled with the manufacturer recommended items you don't void the warranty and you certainly won't get grief for asking how do I change the oil.

Now explain to me why it's different for phone equipment?? Why is working on a phone system that was paid for, and we now own, that we can't purchase and access the full resources like you can with a car or truck?? And if someone blows up their phone system or clears the programming then charge them, but not providing information under the assumption that people can't understand the information is bad.

I certainly don't predict the end of dealer sold & service phone systems but I personally feel that the over-protectiveness of companies is driving more and more companies to look at VoIP solutions that are PC based and can be maintained in house because 'dealers' will not share information with inviduals who are capable of mainting their own equipment.

Just my $.02

Brett, while your chiming in please read the rules of the board. The individual product forums are for user level questions. We have an installer forum for tech level help.

I am no 'dealer' but I darn well know my way around a phone system and can program most systems from scratch and I've never been and never will be a phone system dealer

The fact that you are not a dealer tells me you are not aware of the effort a dealer must make paying for classes, traveling to these classes, incurring all travel and lodging costs in addition to time away from business. A lot of the answers you find here will not be in any manual but something a dealer has learned after hours of frustration and time away from family.

You, Russopower or anybody else can get plenty of information from this board. You can take part in helping others by answering questions where you know the material and be part of the give and take. This will help you attain access to the installer forum. Or you can contact any moderator and make arrangements for help, expect to pay.

Everybody likes automobile analogies and you like to change your own oil. I bet if that auto dealer had to sit down, take time and explain to you just how to change the oil you would get a bill.

You want us to “share information”. That information is our intellectual product and it is for sale just like any other product.

RUSSOPOWER:
I can understand that you, like all of us, don't want to be taken advantage of, but consider this analogy:

Assume you sold a lawn tractor to a customer two years ago and it's still under factory warranty for some components. The customer calls and says the tractor won't start, wants you to pick it up and haul it back to your shop for repairs, and wants a loaner so he can mow his yard while the work is being done. Admittedly this is a stretch because mowing can be put off for a few days... but do you want your phones to go unanswered for that long? You do exactly what the customer asks and the problem turns out to be a bad battery which is under pro-rated coverage. You put in a new battery, return the customer's tractor and pick up your loaner.

Now, you've made two trips with service truck and trailer (for the sake of the analogy remember that it's driven by a service tech, not a helper), you have shop time, you have the pro-rated cost of the new battery, and you have the costs associated with keeping a loaner around for the convenience of your customers. Will you do all this at no charge to the customer? Before you say, "Well, "I'd do it for customer goodwill", add in that almost every customer expects this for almost every problem.. Could you afford to stay in business this way? Because this isn't a worst-case scenario in our business... this is every day with almost every call.

Of course, no analogy is perfect and I don't know the exact details of your situation with your specific dealer but this scenario is a lot more applicable than the idea of getting help changing a CD in your car. Telecom dealers operate under a much different business model than most other businesses. Our product, more than almost anything else our customers own, must be working for them to operate their business. We do the vast majority of our operation at our customers' premises therefore our cost of doing business must take into account the cost of taking our services to you, which includes payroll, vehicles, and the duplication of tools, materials and inventory. We have have to take this into account even in warranty support situations like yours.

As for another dealer charging to figure out the programming of your system, try this on for size: You get a customer whose diesel tractor won't start. His "handyman neighbor" has provided him with lots of advice and he's tried to work on it himself but just couldn't figure things out. Your shop spends several hours on troubleshooting, finds the original problem and fixes it, and spends several more hours troubleshooting and fixing several more problems that were added with the help of the "handyman neighbor". Are you going to charge the shop hours for troubleshooting and repair, or just the repair time? Because, once again, this is a common situation in our business.

Which brings me to LightGuy48's comments. Of course a telephone system is the property of the customer and the customer has a perfect right to self-maintenance. But when we're called in to work on a customer's system and find some obviously misguided programming, we're put in an awkward position. Our job is to resolve this type of problem, not ignore it, and if the customer has created the problem he is rarely willing to gracefully accept the actual costs of correcting it. Regardless of what you might think, we usually end up charging less time than we actually spend on these types of calls. BUT... as professionals, we prefer not to put our colleagues in this same situation. Think about it... we've spent years and dollars to gain the expertise and intuition to do our job well. I think it's perfectly reasonable for us to choose if or how we'll share that information responsibly. The purpose of this board is to help end-users and each other, not to create problems for other professionals in our industry.