Sixth, take special focus on resellers and third party vendors. In the best case scenario, you can find a third party vendor that can offer you software, devices and airtime as a complete package, and do so better than the carrier can directly. However, you will also find newly formed venture capital based companies having massive expenses that are not keeping up with their costs with little to no relationships with carriers the sell solutions for. Ask for a financial statement. The technology they offer may work perfectly and do exactly what you are looking for but they may be out of business six months down the road. You should also ask a reseller what their technology relationship is with the wireless providers they resell. For example, if the network is having a problem, what access do they have to the proper engineers and what priority are their requests given? Just because a third party company has a reseller arrangement for devices and airtime does not mean they are set up well to handle problems when they arise. Some third party companies have you deal directly with the wireless provider so these issues stay separate. And with these types of organizations, calling into their customer service departments to evaluate hold times and response times to problems before you make a purchasing decision is critical. We were told some stories as hold times exceeding well beyond an hour for services that cost over $60.00/month per device. This should be considered unacceptable.
Seventh, ask for references from three customers that are having a good experience with the company and ask for three references of customers that left the services of the company. The latter is often not asked for but could potentially provide you will significantly more detail into what you might expect immediately after the sales closes. We have found that case studies and success stories on websites can be misleading at times. Get the references and make the calls.
Eighth, network reliability is key. As we all know, technology is problematic from time to time. A history of down time over the last year with the network in your area would be valuable data. Ask about their back up and data recovery plans, redundancy systems, and their internal procedures for when the network goes down. Expect your wireless communications to be only as good as the engineering and engineers behind the network. Most are quite good; downtime is a reality. However, for emergency service organizations this is an additional critical layer that should be investigated.