The Eastern Management Group does a considerable amount of
pricing research and analysis for clients. It’s a staple of our business.
Providers use the price tool to understand customer willingness to pay for seat licenses, bundles, applications (e.g., contact center), and popular integrations. Vendors require price comparisons to develop list and street prices, discounts, dealer rebates, and monthly incentives to drive sales.
Customers, notably IT managers, must research competitor prices to make sensible choices when selecting a hosted PBX provider.
How much should you, the customer, pay for a hosted PBX? The answer isn’t on the Internet; only come-on ads are on the Internet. The Eastern Management Group recently published two studies to help SMB and enterprises with the decisions concerning which vendor to select and what price to pay. We include dozens of prices for various hosted PBX configurations from several major vendors in our “
Worldwide Hosted PBX Market 2018-2024” report. I’ll discuss some here. And Eastern Management Group presents customer satisfaction data with numerous vendors in another report, “
2018 Premises and Hosted PBX Customer Satisfaction.” I’ll cover two highly rated providers here as well.
Let’s walk through some pricing and customer satisfaction research findings. I’ll use a model built from our price database, as shown in the chart below. The model is a branch with 24 users requiring hosted PBX capability for different applications. In this case, eight users need basic PBX features; another eight require basic PBX plus UC features; and eight more need basic PBX, UC, and contact center features.
By pricing the 24-seat model using side-by-side comparisons for six providers, including some vendors such as
RingCentral and
Mitel that are highly regarded by their customers, here’s what we found. The six providers’ monthly price (MRR) for the 24-user configuration ranged from $517 to $1,738. The average monthly price was $893. That works out to $37.20 per seat, a fair price. In case you’re wondering, both RingCentral and Mitel are less expensive than $37.20 for the identical 24-seat configuration.
The Customer Is a Winner -- Customers can easily get worldwide service with a hosted system. It’s pretty easy to get coverage and support in 30 or more countries, but this varies by provider. So, check first with the vendor.
Practically every hosted PBX system offers hundreds of features. Even a small UCaaS provider can do this. Typically, most providers also offer dozens of well-priced integrations and third-party ecosystems.
If selecting a hosted PBX provider has you flummoxed or you want a second opinion, the report includes that sort of
intelligence, too.
The Provider Is a Winner -- In a recent No Jitter post about winners in hosted PBX customer satisfaction, RingCentral received high praise from customers in Eastern Management Group’s Customer Satisfaction Measurements. And yet our model shows RingCentral prices for the 24-seat fully configured cloud PBX are less than the industry average of $37.20. It goes to show the best in the customer’s eye doesn’t have to be the most expensive when it comes to hosted PBX.
Because all voice and many UC features are pivotal to every business, expect to pay a fair price for a good hosted PBX system. I’ve discussed some ranges in this post. Now you can choose wisely.
For more information about Eastern Management Group’s“2018 Premises and Hosted PBX Customer Satisfaction” or “Worldwide Hosted PBX Market 2018-2024” reports, please
ask our researchers or contact John Malone directly
[email protected].
