One of my coaching clients asked me how to dig deep into a service providers knowledge base to insure that they can actually deliver on what they say. I had to chuckle.

In most cases, only a few people at any service provider really know what is under the hood in any detail.  Two examples for you follow.

I ordered a PRI from a CLEC. I asked numerous times if it was TDM PRI or not. The Channel Manager reassured me that it was a PRI. Finally, when I received the FOC date, I asked once more: Was this a true TDM PRI or was this PRI signaling at the CPE. It turns out that it was PRI signaling from the CPE and a SIP Trunk back to the CLEC. BAM! Cancel the order. Start over.

In the another case, the Agent is trying to determine if the Cisco 7900 phones can be used when the customer migrates to another Hosted PBX provider. A couple of ITSP's have said YES; a couple have said NO. It made the Agent insecure in proposing a solution since he couldn't get a straight answer. [Cisco 7900 were running MGCP, while most ITSP's run SIP.]

The problem is that everyone is only looking at Quota and getting the contract signed. Our industry is sliding away from the Customer Matters.
What good is it to get the contract signed only to not be able to deliver on service?

That's a lot of wasted manpower plus hard costs for anything ordered from the ILEC. Not to mention, you burn the Agent and the Customer.

Not many CLEC's worry about branding, but most of the Branding occurs closest to the customer, where WOM (word-of-mouth) and relationships occur. If you give incorrect information, if you lie, if you don't care if the information is accurate, you are ruining 3 brands: the CLEC, the Agent and YOUR OWN. 

One way to avoid this is to limit the number of carriers you deal with. It's a challenge to know anything in-depth about 20 carriers, let allow 40 or 100. And in the ITSP sector, I think you need to take a regional approach. You want to be selling someone as close to the customer as possible for QOS and other reasons.

At the end of the day, you may make mistakes due to bad information. All you can do is give your customer the best choices you can and be as transparent as possible. When the mistake happens, apologize, work to fix it fast and give the customer Plan B.