sundance-communications.com/forum Forums Other TDM Phone Systems ESI Telephones & Systems Company that sold us the Phone System Gouges Us

I am not going to publically name the company. However, I was wondering if anybody knows of phone companies in the Washington DC area that would provide service to an existing phone system. ESI IVX E-Class.

Every time we want a minor change, our current company wants to charge us a ridiculous amount for a 5 minute change. For example, the people that was sitting at Ext 108 moved to where Ext 113 was. $75 to "swap" those two extensions? Ridiculous! Talk about gouging!!

They had originally given me the installer password but then conveniently took it away.

Thats not bad , we would charge $95.00 ,,, Good Luck

Keep in mind the tech needs to drive to your site ... while he is doing that the company that employs him pays his salary as well as 50 cents for each mile he drives. They also have health insurance, social security etc costs associated with that employee as well as the actual salary he earns. Before he can even come out to your site he needs to be trained on the equipment so that he knows how to make the change you need. And then after all that if you were to go down and be out of service you would expect that company to have the parts in stock and a tech available to get you back up and running quickly.

After all that it sounds like $75 is a pretty good deal .... not to mention you are in DC which from what i understand is an expensive place to try and do business!!

You are obviously not going to get a lot of sympathy from a group of technicians who fight every day to earn a living.

There are options available so that you could make changes like that yourself ... invest in a class so that you can make the cross connect changes yourself or just pay your installer to terminate the stations on a patch panel and label it ... then you can plug and play as you wish.

Oops -- was definitely not clear on that one! My mistake.

This is what they are charging us to remote into the system and make the change from their office.

If you were running a business what would you charge
for a remote program change ?

If you have an ESI IVX E-class, You can't do an extension swap remotely. I wonder if you in fact you have an ESI Com Server....? Or maybe the technician actually did visit and you were not aware.

If it is in fact an IVX E-class, and they did do an extension swap remotely, I would say $75 is a great deal, because none of us here on this board could do it!

Ok. The extension change seems understandable given it is not a remote change.
Mea culpa folks! Looks like I had a misunderstanding and thought that was a remote change. Complaint about the extension change withdrawn because:
1) Did not realize that cannot be done remotely
2) I don't recall what the price was for that one
So... I stand corrected there.

However, there are other things (remote changes) that seem a bit steep given the fact that they are a five minute change. For example: changing our ending time by half an hour Mon-Fri. (That was the one that was $75.)

By the way, thanks to everyone for their quick replies -- both this time and other time I've posted questions! You guys are a great board!

Have you looked at getting a yearly maintenance agreement ??

We may go that route. For a long time the desks/extensions and who sat there was stable. This is probably going to be the case again for a while. So... may be easier for us to simply do T&M if it comes up again at some point in the future. Thanks for the suggestion -- we may decide to do that route anyway.

Make sure you get the specifics of the maintenance contract .... most don't cover extension swaps and things like that.... they cover the system and often labor if something breaks but not moves, adds or changes to the system.

If you think about it there is really no fair way to price those things because one customer will have you in weekly and the next customer won't change anything for five years.