SIP Survey Snippet – Is SIP Certification Important?

Last month we shared the release of the SIP School’s SIP Survey 2015 from SIP School CEO, Graham Francis.

What’s interesting about the 2015 SIP Survey is that it not only features more respondents than previous years but, it includes responses from both Internet Telephony Service Providers (ITSPs or, “providers”) and a new segment, the actual end users of SIP trunking services.

We promised that we’d break the in-depth survey into bite-sized chunks so today’s theme is SIP certification.

Is Official SIP Certification Important?

The SIP SchoolTM has issued SSCA® Certification to over 4300 certified engineers around the world.

SIP School Certified Associate (SSCA®) have proven that they understand the SIP protocol and Voice over IP technology.

The SIP Survey took the opportunity to ask if service providers and end users “want or even need a SIP Certification”:

sip survey sip certification

Over 80% of respondents agreed that some form of industry-wide standard certification is helpful.

The survey shared a few quotes like this comment from Joe Alice at Verizon:

I agree that while the SSCA isn’t a vendor specific certification like CCNP from Cisco for example it does reflect a proven familiarity and knowledge of SIP on the part of the individual engineer.

SIPTRUNK.com is SSMPTM Certified

SSMP_CertThe SIPTRUNK.com sales team are SIP Sales and Marketing Certified Professionals (SSMPTM).

Which is good, considering 80% of surveyed providers and users appreciate the educational background.

“Getting staff trained and certified by The SIP School proves that the people at SIPTRUNK.com are serious about the SIP trunking business,” said Graham Francis, CEO of The SIP School.

“Their clients can be assured that they are dealing with educated professionals who will help them migrate to new services that will benefit their business,” said Francis.

How Good is Your SIP Trunk Provider’s Support?

The importance placed on certification brings to our next interesting find from the survey – SIP trunk provider support staff performance:

sip survey support staff

This question was only answered by the end users, not the service providers.

In the SIP Trunk Provider segment, here’s how helpful customer’s thought their support staff was:

  • 46.88% displayed “Average ability”
  • 30.17% provided “Great assistance showing good technical skills”
  • 13.72% said their provider “needs education”
  • 9.23% had “No comment”

The majority of folks said that their SIP trunk provider’s support was “average” or below. Only 30% said that the support was “great.”

I’m assuming that those who said “no comment” were just being polite. So, clearly there’s room for improvement and SIP certification is one step towards better educating those who are tasked with tech support and customer service.

Troubleshooting is Very Important

SIP trunk support performance brings us to our last point about certifications – troubleshooting and interoperability:

sip survey troubleshooting

In the history of the SIP Survey they have found that once again getting the SIP trunk to work with the service provider is an area of high importance with 72.78% of respondents ticking off “Troubleshooting and Interoperability” as an area of interest.

The SIP Survey summarizes this finding, “Of course, you want to get the SIP trunks up and running and be able to
fix things if there are issues. ”

Certification, support, and troubleshooting – they’re all connected. Ongoing education will continue to be crucial for providers and users.

Stay tuned for the next SIP Survey Snippet!