Phone System Vendor Scorecard
Demos are theater: every vendor shows their best 20 minutes. A scorecard forces the comparison onto your requirements instead of their highlights. Here’s the weighted card our advisors use — 10 factors, 100 points.
The scorecard
| # | Factor | Weight | What to score |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Reliability & call quality | 20 | Uptime SLA and credits, redundancy architecture, reference customers at your scale, your own pilot experience |
| 2 | 3-year total cost | 15 | Full TCO from the pricing grid: licenses, hardware, implementation, add-ons, admin time |
| 3 | Feature fit for your workflows | 15 | Your must-have list only (not their feature page): call flows, auto-attendant depth, recording, paging, whatever you marked required |
| 4 | Integrations | 10 | Native (not “API exists”) integrations with your email, CRM, help desk — tested in the pilot |
| 5 | Implementation & migration | 10 | Porting process quality, project plan realism, configuration burden on your team |
| 6 | Admin experience | 10 | Can your admin do the top 5 changes (new user, ring group, schedule, recording policy, report) without support tickets? Score from the pilot portal |
| 7 | Support | 8 | Severity-based response SLAs, support channel quality during your pilot, escalation path |
| 8 | Vendor viability | 5 | Financial stability, roadmap delivery history, reference churn |
| 9 | Security & compliance | 5 | Certifications (SOC 2, HIPAA BAA if needed), SSO, role-based admin, data residency |
| 10 | Contract flexibility | 2 | Month-to-month option, renewal caps, porting/exit terms |
Score each factor 1–5, multiply by weight, sum to 100. Any vendor under 60 is out; the top two go to a head-to-head negotiation.
Three rules that make scoring honest
- Score from the pilot, not the demo. Every vendor will give 10–25 pilot users a proof of concept for free. The scorecard is filled from what your people actually experienced.
- Score independently, then meet. Independent scores prevent the loudest voice from anchoring the group. Reconcile the outliers, not the averages.
- Write one sentence of evidence per score. “Support 3 — waited 2 days on a severity-2 port question” beats gut feel in the debate that follows.
What usually decides it
In our experience the top two factors that actually flip deals: admin experience (the hidden cost for years after go-live) and implementation quality (the hidden cost of the first year). Vendors know demos decide deals, so they invest there — scorecard discipline moves the decision to the factors that matter.
When the scorecard picks a winner, make the market finish the job: competing quotes put the negotiating leverage of deal volume behind your final pricing — even against the vendor you already chose.