Internet & Telephone: Serving Businesses with Effective Communications Strategy

In today’s world, productivity hinges on the ability to collaborate quickly, effectively and remotely. “Users want smartphones, tablets, laptops and every kind of mobile device. But they do not want to be tethered to a wire,” explains Paul Cissel, CEO, Internet & Telephone. As a result, Internet & Telephone has partnered with Cisco to deliver collaboration and networking. Based out of Methuen, MA, Internet & Telephone is a premium partner with Cisco. “Collaboration should be fun - and assisting customers to collaborate is really an important part of our company,” reveals Cissel.

Internet & Telephone offers Managed IT and a full telecom-suite. The company’s Customer Account Managers (CAMs) are trained to implement custom solutions and the company’s standard technology stack is based on core Cisco equipment that can be deployed for small, medium and large business. A standard practice at I&T is to develop a 3-5 year IT roadmap for each customer and then meet quarterly to review and adjust the plan. “It’s an important part of the roadmap, and Cisco has been great about listening to the marketplace,” says Cissel.

Following the seven layer OSI (Open System Interface) model, Internet & Telephone has a unique onboarding process and has found that developing smart business processes is a foundational must-have for success. CEO Cissel and CTO Doug Smith attended ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) courses, which comprise a set of practices for IT management that align IT services with the needs of business, which is not an easy undertaking.The ITIL framework —processes, procedures, tasks, and checklists designed to enable any organization to establish a baseline from which it can plan, implement, and measure IT initiatives — is published as a series of five core volumes, each of which covers a different stage of IT service management. “We’ve identified 115 specific customer touch points from the time we first engage with a client to the end of the first 12 months,” says Cissel. “To help prepare our employees for each customer, we follow a philosophy called ‘Know Thy Customer,’ which involves quizzing our employees on a daily basis about key information they should know about each customer.