This past weekend, I took my daughter to a local music store to shop for a guitar amp. I said to the salesperson, “we are interested in a guitar amp appropriate for a teen bedroom and that isn’t loud enough to scare all the dogs in the neighborhood.” The gentleman said, “I gotcha’” and left to bring us a model amp.

When he returned, he pointed to my 15-year-old and asked her to pick out any guitar so she could try the amp out. She began playing and the salesperson showed off features like reverb, compression and distortion.  You could see in my daughter’s eyes that she was preparing to give me that daaaaaad face — she wanted the amp.

She is taking a music production class in school so computer connectivity is an important feature. I asked the salesperson a bunch of questions. As it turned out, the model he was showing us was an older edition. The new one, that he had to get from another store, could easily and directly connect to a computer via USB. The older model needed a sound mixer. And get this, the new model was the same price as the older model.

Asking a few pertinent questions led us to getting an amp that was a better fit for her needs. Doing your due diligence, educating yourself and asking good questions are essential to getting the best communications solution at a time when communications are more essential than ever.

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Making you a smarter consumer is what our Essentials series have been all about. Chapter 8, the final chapter of our unified communications eBook includes a recap and takeaways. If you do read through the complete book, you will come away with lots of good questions to keep your prospective vendors honest, but also to better match your needs with what is possible. That is a win for everyone.

Chapter 8 also includes clues about what is coming next. Once you have the fundamentals, or essentials, you can build on your foundation to optimize and to incorporate new tools to take your unified communications solution to the next level. People want integrations, not just between office and contact center communications, but also with business apps and Microsoft Teams. Analytics and AI? Quality management in the contact center? Check, check and check.

You can find all our eBook projects including ones specifically about Microsoft Teams, small businesses and CPaaS here.

Finally, a heartfelt thank you to the crew putting all these resources together for our 8x8 communities including customers, prospects and partners. We welcome feedback and suggestions for topics you would like us to cover. We have some research projects in the works and have plans for additional projects that will be educational, informative and, hopefully, maybe a little entertaining.