Ten years on Telnyx: Diamond Voice manages hundreds of numbers from one portal

Joel Black remembers what number management used to look like. "We would have to submit a request through email, wait a day or so, follow up on it, make sure they actually got it, that they were working on it," said Black, President and Partner at Diamond Voice. "It was kind of helter skelter." Diamond Voice moved to Telnyx at least ten years ago, coming off a bad experience with another carrier, and the portal is what closed the deal.

Hundreds of numbers, managed in minutes

Diamond Voice manages hundreds of phone numbers between the ones active with customers and the ones held in inventory. "What Telnyx brought to the table at that point, with the dashboard and the online control tools, really was what cinched the deal," Black said. "We could manage those numbers much more easily: get new numbers, get rid of old numbers, as well as manage our bandwidth through the portal. And that was a big plus."

The implementation was mostly a numbers exercise. Before VoIP and IP connectivity, a service bureau could not simply order numbers in other cities, so Diamond Voice bought ahead of demand in the cities and regions it served, with a large inventory in its home market of Dallas-Fort Worth. Those lists had to move. "We had to move those numbers over from the other carriers to Telnyx," Black said. The company had already moved to IP connections, so the rest was "a matter of reconnecting, putting the IP addresses into our platform so that we could make and receive calls through Telnyx."

One thing changed permanently. "We no longer have to maintain as large of an inventory of numbers because we can get them quickly and readily," he said. "Prior to that, we had to hang on to numbers so we would have them available for the customer to be able to turn them up fairly quickly."

From voicemail lines to hosted PBX

Diamond Voice started in the 1990s as a voicemail company, when voicemail itself was new. That led to voice information services, the movie lines people called to hear showtimes before apps existed, and then to inbound payment processing over the phone. The company still runs each of those, now as niche applications for customers that need them.

The pivot came with broadband. "Once voice over IP became a viable thing with the introduction of broadband, we started moving into that area, because we knew that the information line services we got started with were giving way to online apps," Black said. Diamond Voice had already been installing phone systems for companies on analog and digital lines, so hosted voice was a natural next step. "Right now, the majority of the business that we do is providing hosted PBX services for customers, and we route those inbound and outbound calls over Telnyx."

When the carrier goes down, it looks bad on us

Black is candid about what reliability means for a hosted PBX provider. "When we were primarily just inbound calls, if the line would go down because we had some carrier issue, it wasn't the end of the world. It may have been a marketing line," he said. "Now, when their bread and butter phone calls are going in and out through our platform, if our carriers go down, then it looks bad on us. They don't look at our carriers. We could tell them the carrier went down. They don't care. It's on us to make it work."

That is the lens he uses on Telnyx. He recalled a large attack a couple of years ago and the response to it. "You guys had the resources to be able to respond to stuff like that and to get back on top of it," he said. "Stuff happens, even the big guys have their days. But when it happened to you guys, you were able to really step up and stay on top of it."

Asked for a hard number, Black gave an honest answer instead. "I don't really have anything that I could say, here's a percentage or here's a number of customers. But I do know that our own internal headaches have gone down since we moved from previous carriers over to Telnyx. And that probably does have a dollar value, when you have to spend less time troubleshooting issues with a carrier and more on focusing on your customers."

Why Black recommends Telnyx

"Telnyx has been pretty solid," Black said. "We've gotten good response from the support side of things. That's evolved over the years as you guys have grown, and that's to be expected. But access to getting the services tweaked and online quickly, and then having the support when there's issues, is really important."

His closing line is the one a hosted voice provider lives by. "Having a reliable carrier that can pull things together quickly and stay functional is critical."