 Sunco Communication and Installation Ltd. Unified Communications Readiness Assessment Prepared for Northgate Millwork Ltd. |
Hello Dana Whitfield, Thank you for completing the Sunco Unified Communications Readiness Assessment. Your personalized results are below. Assessment completed: August 24, 2026 |
Your Score 42% aligned · grade D | | Readiness Signal Not yet ready Several foundations are missing, and moving before they are fixed moves the problems with you |
|
HOW THIS SCORE WAS CALCULATED Your Communications Readiness Score is the share of the capabilities assessed here that your organization has in place. Each of the 31 questions scores 0 to 3, where 0 means the capability is fully in place and 3 means it is not, so your score is the share of the 93 available points you did not lose. Eleven questions carry a not-applicable answer — no remote workers, no call recording, phone only, no change planned. Choosing it removes that question from your score AND from the denominator, so it neither credits you with something you do not have nor penalises you for a need you do not have. The previous version of this assessment scored those answers 0, which credited them as strengths and printed “we do not record calls” in a list of what the organization was doing well. Unified communications readiness has no single controlling framework: no body publishes a numbered control set for whether a business should move its phone system. So this assessment cites something published and checkable on 25 of its 31 questions. Where a regulation or a technical standard applies, it is named — Recommendation G.114 of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) on one-way delay, Telecom Decisions of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) 2005-21, 2005-61 and 2005-28 on 9-1-1 obligations, the CRTC’s Unsolicited Telecommunications Rules on automated outbound calls, Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation on digital channels, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada on call recording and on processing across borders, ISO 22301:2019 — ISO being the International Organization for Standardization — on business continuity, and ISO/IEC 42001:2023, jointly with the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), on governing artificial intelligence (AI). Where neither applies, a technology or industry measurement takes its place and is labelled as one — the four connectivity models Microsoft publishes for Teams, what Statistics Canada measures about adoption and cloud use at this size, and what customers report about waiting on hold. A measurement is not a requirement and is not presented as one. On the remaining 6 questions nothing published applies at all, and the assessment says so, attributing the recommendation to Sunco. Inventing a framework reference for those 6 would have produced a tidier panel and a less honest document. Where a question touches provincial privacy law, note that Alberta health information is governed by the Health Information Act rather than by the Personal Information Protection Act, which does not govern health information. Answer options are shuffled so the scoring key cannot be inferred from position, except that a not-applicable answer and a genuine “we are not sure” are always shown last. Band boundaries — above 85% and above 50% — are the Fully achieved and Largely achieved thresholds of the ISO/IEC 33020:2019 process achievement scale, the letter grades within them are Sunco’s own subdivision and are not part of that standard. Five of the six areas carry five questions and one carries six, so a single answer moves about a fifth of that area’s score: read the area percentages as direction rather than precision. The requirements panel is a checklist rather than a second score, deliberately. This assessment surfaces readiness gaps — it does not certify compliance with any standard, and it is not legal advice. |
Section Breakdown | Section | Aligned | Risk Level | | Current Communications Environment | 53% | Partly ready | | Infrastructure & Network Readiness | 47% | NOT YET READY | | User Needs & Collaboration | 47% | NOT YET READY | | Continuity, Emergency Service & Compliance | 50% | NOT YET READY | | Advanced Communications Needs | 25% | NOT YET READY | | AI & Future Communications Readiness | 27% | NOT YET READY |
|
AT A GLANCE 4 in place | 17 need work | 7 high risk |
Every answer you gave, sorted into three groups. Domains appear worst-first within each. |
IN PLACE · 4 What you’re doing well These capabilities are already in place. They are what makes a move straightforward rather than risky, and several of them are things most organizations your size do not have. |
| Infrastructure & Network Readiness | 1 of 5 · 47% aligned |
What is your primary internet connection type, and does it provide dedicated bandwidth for your business? Dedicated business fibre or Ethernet with service level agreement (SLA)-guaranteed bandwidth |
| User Needs & Collaboration | 1 of 5 · 47% aligned |
Do your teams require video conferencing integrated with your phone system? Yes — integrated video is important and works well today |
| Continuity, Emergency Service & Compliance | 1 of 6 · 50% aligned |
Is your organization planning for growth, acquisition, or significant headcount changes over the next 24 months? Yes — growth or expansion is planned and we have assessed whether our current platform supports it |
| Current Communications Environment | 1 of 5 · 53% aligned |
How many physical locations does your organization need to connect? Single location only |
|
NEEDS WORK · 17 What needs work Partly in place, informal, or never tested. None of these are emergencies — but each one is something a migration, an outage or an audit eventually exposes. |
| Advanced Communications Needs | 2 of 5 · 25% aligned |
| Do you have a team that handles inbound customer calls in a structured way — queuing, routing to the right person or group, and reporting on wait times or resolution? | Mostly in place |
Your answer: Routing works — an auto-attendant and a hunt group get calls to the right group — but there is no reporting: we cannot say how many callers waited, or hung up. A contact centre does not require hundreds of agents. Any organization with more than five people handling inbound calls — and any requirement to route, queue, report, or manage those interactions — is operating a contact centre in practice, whether or not it is called one. How Sunco closes this Without reporting the only calls you know about are the ones that were answered. Abandoned calls leave no trace, so the measure of how well this works is the absence of complaints, which is not a measure. |
Vonage — Global Customer Engagement Report 2025 (industry measurement) · The two most-cited service frustrations are both failures of inbound handling No standard prescribes queueing or routing, so the measurement that applies is what customers report: waiting a long time to reach somebody and having to make contact more than once are the two most-cited frustrations worldwide, both at 65%, ahead of being transferred at 63%. All three are what queueing, routing and reporting exist to prevent — and without reporting, the only calls you know about are the ones that were answered. |
|
| Do customers or clients contact your organization through channels other than phone — web chat, email, text message (SMS), or social media? | Partly in place |
Your answer: Yes — but each channel is managed separately with different tools When customers reach you through multiple channels and your team manages each one with a different tool, agent attention is fragmented and handoffs between channels are lossy. A unified digital communications platform brings voice, chat, email, and messaging into a single workspace — no context lost between channels. How Sunco closes this Channel fragmentation is invisible from the outside but costly on the inside. Every time an agent switches tools to respond to a different channel, they lose context and spend time on coordination rather than the customer. |
Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) — S.C. 2010, c. 23 · Consent, sender identification and unsubscribe for commercial electronic messages Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) governs email, text and messaging — including automated chat and outbound text — and requires consent, identification of the sender and a working unsubscribe path. The maximum administrative monetary penalty per violation is $10 million for a business and $1 million for an individual. It does not govern voice calls; those fall under the Unsolicited Telecommunications Rules. |
|
| Advanced Communications Needs: Structured inbound handling, recording and digital channels are where a phone system stops being a phone system and starts being how the business runs. |
| AI & Future Communications Readiness | 3 of 5 · 27% aligned |
| How would you describe your organization's leadership posture toward artificial intelligence (AI) adoption in business communications? | Mostly in place |
Your answer: Interest and intent are there but we have no formal roadmap or budget commitment yet artificial intelligence (AI) adoption in communications is not a technology decision — it is a leadership decision. Where there is executive sponsorship, a defined scope and somebody accountable for it, the work gets done; where there is interest without any of the three, it stalls at the demonstration. That is a claim about organizations rather than about technology, and it is the reason this section starts with leadership rather than with tooling. About one Alberta business in five of this size has put AI to work in the past year, so the useful question is not whether to start but which single use case is worth starting with. How Sunco closes this Interest without commitment is the most common artificial intelligence (AI) posture in Canadian SMBs — and the gap between interest and action is almost always a structured roadmap conversation, not a budget conversation. Sunco can facilitate that in a single working session. |
Statistics Canada — Canadian Survey on Business Conditions, Q2 2026 (industry measurement) · What adoption at this size actually looks like, against which to read your own posture No standard measures leadership posture. What is measured is where businesses of this size have got to: 21.1% of Alberta businesses with 20 to 99 employees used artificial intelligence (AI) to produce goods or deliver services in the year to the second quarter of 2026, and 25.8% nationally. About one in five — so neither the laggard nor the outlier position is the one most organizations are actually in. |
|
| Does your organization use communications analytics — call volumes, wait times, agent performance, resolution rates — to make operational or strategic business decisions? | Partly in place |
Your answer: We know the data exists but have not built processes to use it Every call your phone system handles contains signal: which issues are recurring, which agents resolve on first contact, which time-of-day patterns drive overload. Organizations that surface and act on this data reduce costs, improve customer experience, and identify training gaps before they become retention problems. Most SMBs have the data — very few use it. How Sunco closes this Data without process is unused infrastructure. Sunco can help you establish a weekly rhythm of reviewing three key metrics — handle time, first-call resolution, and abandon rate — that gives your leadership team actionable signal without becoming a full analytics program. |
No published standard governs this question · What you measure and act on is a management choice No standard requires communications analytics. The recommendation is Sunco’s, and the sequence matters more than the tooling: a dashboard nobody has a decision for is a dashboard nobody opens. |
|
| Has your organization established policies or guidelines for how artificial intelligence (AI) tools may be used by staff in customer communications, data handling, and business operations? | Partly in place |
Your answer: We rely on individual staff judgment for artificial intelligence (AI) tool usage — no organizational standard artificial intelligence (AI) governance in communications is not just about compliance — it is about protecting customer trust. When AI tools process call recordings, transcribe conversations, or generate automated responses, they handle personal information under Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). Organizations that govern AI use formally can deploy faster, avoid regulatory exposure, and build client-facing proof points that differentiate them in regulated sectors. How Sunco closes this Individual judgment is the highest-risk artificial intelligence (AI) governance posture. Different staff make different decisions about what AI tools to use and how — creating inconsistent customer experiences and undocumented compliance exposure across every interaction. |
ISO/IEC 42001:2023 — Artificial intelligence management systems · Annex A control objectives for governing the use of artificial intelligence (AI), including data and third-party controls — published jointly by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) ISO/IEC 42001 sets out control objectives for an artificial intelligence (AI) management system — policy, roles, data handling, third-party and supplier controls, and human oversight. Where AI tools process call recordings and transcripts, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC)’s accountability principles apply to them as they do to any other processing of personal information: the organization is accountable, not the tool and not the vendor. |
|
| AI & Future Communications Readiness: artificial intelligence (AI) in communications is deployable at this scale today, which makes choosing what not to deploy the more valuable half of the decision. |
| Infrastructure & Network Readiness | 3 of 5 · 47% aligned |
| Do you have a secondary or backup internet connection at your primary site(s)? | Partly in place |
Your answer: No — single internet connection only A single internet connection is a single point of failure for cloud communications. When that connection fails — due to an internet service provider (ISP) outage, cable cut, or equipment failure — your cloud phone system goes with it. A secondary connection from a different provider on a different path eliminates this exposure. How Sunco closes this A single internet connection means your cloud phone system is only as reliable as your internet service provider (ISP). Adding a secondary connection from a different provider is the highest-impact continuity improvement available for cloud communications. |
ISO 22301:2019 — Business continuity management systems · International Organization for Standardization (ISO) requirements on redundancy for a single point of failure the organization has identified as critical A single internet connection makes voice, email and any cloud application share one failure. ISO 22301 does not mandate a second circuit; it requires that the organization has decided, on the record, whether it can operate without the first. |
|
| If a dedicated private environment or an on-premises deployment turned out to be the right answer for you, do you know whether the infrastructure you already run could host it? | Mostly in place |
Your answer: We know what hardware we have, but not whether it has the capacity or the support to take on a communications platform. The old version of this question scored having virtualized servers as the best answer, which meant a business that has deliberately moved everything to software-as-a-service and owns no servers scored two points worse — for being further along the direction the rest of this assessment recommends. Owning infrastructure is not maturity. Knowing what you own, whether it has capacity, and who keeps it patched — that is the thing worth measuring, and it is the same question whether the answer turns out to be yes or no. How Sunco closes this The gap here is one check rather than a project: whether the hypervisor is a version the platform supports, and whether there is headroom. It is worth doing before anybody quotes you for hardware, because the answer sometimes removes a procurement step entirely. |
Statistics Canada — Survey of Digital Technology and Internet Use, 2023 (industry measurement) · Cloud computing is the most-used technology measured, which is the context this choice sits in No standard prescribes hosted, private-cloud or on-premises for a communications platform. The measurement worth knowing is the direction of travel: cloud computing was the most commonly used information and communications technology among Canadian businesses in 2023, at 48%, up from 45% in 2021. Which does not decide your answer — it means running nothing on site is a normal position rather than a gap, and the question is whether you know which position you are in. |
|
| Does your organization have requirements — regulatory, contractual, or policy-based — for where your communications data is stored, processed, or accessed? | Partly in place |
Your answer: We have not considered where our communications data is stored or processed Communications platforms process sensitive data: recorded calls, contact information, message content, and call metadata. For organizations in regulated sectors — healthcare, government, financial services, legal — where that data lives carries legal weight. Under Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), organizations cannot outsource accountability obligations to their cloud provider. How Sunco closes this Communications data — call recordings, contact histories, message content — is personal information under the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada is specific about what follows: you stay responsible for it after it is transferred to a provider for processing, you must use contractual or other means to give it comparable protection there, and you must tell your customers if it may be sent to another jurisdiction where the courts, law enforcement and national security authorities of that country can reach it. |
Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada — Guidelines for processing personal data across borders · Transfer for processing is a use, not a disclosure — but transparency still applies Additional consent is not required to transfer personal information to a provider for processing, which surprises most organizations. What is required is comparable protection by contractual or other means, and telling customers their information may be processed in another jurisdiction and reachable by that country’s courts, law enforcement and national security authorities. |
|
| Infrastructure & Network Readiness: Cloud communications run over your internet connection, so the connection is part of the phone system whether or not anyone has treated it that way. |
| User Needs & Collaboration | 3 of 5 · 47% aligned |
| Can your remote and mobile workers access full phone system features from their mobile device? | Partly in place |
Your answer: No — remote workers use personal mobile numbers, not our phone system "Full features" means more than just making calls — it means transferring to colleagues, accessing the shared directory, appearing in the organization's presence system, and routing calls through your business number rather than a personal cell. Without this, remote staff are effectively disconnected from your phone system. How Sunco closes this Remote workers operating outside your phone system are invisible to callers, cannot be transferred to properly, and have no business identity on outbound calls. |
Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission — 9-1-1 services for VoIP · Mobile and softphone users are the nomadic case Full mobile access is a productivity gain and it also moves those users into basic 9-1-1, where the registered address is the fallback when the caller cannot speak. Worth deploying; worth telling people about at the same time. |
|
| Does your organization use a customer relationship management (CRM) or business application, and do incoming calls automatically identify the caller? | Partly in place |
Your answer: We have a customer relationship management (CRM) but it is not integrated with our phone system Screen pop — the automatic display of a customer record when an inbound call arrives — eliminates the 30-second scramble to look up who is calling before you answer. For organizations with a customer relationship management (CRM), it transforms the first ten seconds of every customer call. How Sunco closes this customer relationship management (CRM)-phone integration is one of the highest-impact productivity improvements available. Screen pop, click-to-dial, and automatic call logging eliminate manual lookups and data entry — on every single call. |
No published standard governs this question · Whether calls should identify the caller is an operational choice No published standard governs telephony and customer relationship management (CRM) integration. The recommendation is Sunco’s. Note that a screen pop puts a customer record in front of whoever answers, which is a reason to think about who that is. |
|
| If your staff use Microsoft Teams, where does business calling actually live — and was that a decision somebody made? | Mostly in place |
Your answer: We use Microsoft Teams and staff call each other inside it, but external calls run on the phone system — so each person has two numbers and two voicemail boxes. Two things are worth separating here. The first is whether each person has one number and one voicemail box, because two of each means messages accumulate in the one nobody checks and presence is only ever half right. The second is who provides the calling and what it can do: Microsoft publishes four ways to connect Teams to the telephone network, one of which makes Microsoft the operator and three of which do not — and Microsoft is explicit that Teams’ own calling covers auto attendant and call queues, with anything built around a customer journey needing a platform integrated alongside it. So a business whose calling is person-to-person has more options than one running queues, recording or automated voice handling. How Sunco closes this Two voicemail boxes per person means messages accumulate in the one nobody checks, and presence is only ever half right — somebody on an external call still shows as available. This is the most common state and the most tractable: the question is which of the two numbers each person keeps, and who provides the calling behind it. |
Microsoft — the published connectivity models and the published capability boundary · Four ways to connect Microsoft Teams to the public telephone network, and what Microsoft says its own calling does and does not cover Microsoft publishes exactly four connectivity models: a Calling Plan, with Microsoft itself as the operator; Operator Connect, through a certified landline operator; Teams Phone Mobile, through a certified mobile operator, which carries user numbers only; and Direct Routing, using any operator through a session border controller you procure and manage. Which of the four you are on — or that you are on none of them — determines who provides your calling, and that is a commercial decision as much as a technical one. Microsoft also sets the capability boundary itself: it states that Teams’ own cloud calling covers auto attendant and call queues, and that organizations wanting business tools and workflows built around the customer journey integrate a contact centre platform with Teams Phone rather than relying on it alone. This is a published capability set, not a requirement, and no arrangement among them is inherently correct — the right one depends on what your calling has to do. |
|
| User Needs & Collaboration: The right platform depends on how your people actually work now, which for most organizations is not how the current system was specified for. |
| Continuity, Emergency Service & Compliance | 2 of 6 · 50% aligned |
| Has your organization established how long it could operate without inbound and outbound calling — and does what you have in place today actually meet that? | Mostly in place |
Your answer: Yes — we have set the period, and what we have in place does not meet it. The old version of this question scored the tolerance itself: zero tolerance best, high tolerance worst. That penalises accuracy — a firm whose crews live on mobiles and whose office phone could be down for a day was marked three points down for saying so truthfully. Tolerance is the requirement, not the maturity. ISO 22301 asks the organization to determine the period it can be without an activity and then build to it, and the gap worth measuring is the distance between those two things. How Sunco closes this A known and unmet target is the most tractable state on this ladder: the requirement exists, so the work is a design question with an answer that can be checked against it. Automatic failover to mobile or to a second route is usually the cheapest way to close the first hour. |
ISO 22301:2019 — Business continuity management systems · International Organization for Standardization (ISO) requirement to determine tolerable disruption for an activity before choosing controls for it ISO 22301 asks the organization to set the period it can be without an activity, and then to build to that. A stated tolerance that has never been costed is not a tolerance — it is an assumption about a number nobody has looked up. |
|
| Does your organization have a documented communications continuity plan — covering how your team communicates with customers and each other if your primary phone system fails? | Partly in place |
Your answer: Informal — we know roughly what to do but it is not documented or regularly tested Most organizations discover their communications continuity gap during an outage, not before it. A documented plan answers three questions before the phones go down: how do customers reach you, how does your team coordinate internally, and who activates the failover. Without those answers documented, every outage starts with a scramble. How Sunco closes this Informal knowledge is a continuity liability. When the person who knows what to do is unavailable during an outage, informal plans collapse. A one-page documented failover procedure and a quarterly 15-minute test eliminates this exposure. |
ISO 22301:2019 — Business continuity management systems · International Organization for Standardization (ISO) requirement for documented and exercised response procedures The standard’s requirement is documented and exercised, in that order. An informal understanding held by the people who happen to be in the office satisfies neither, and a business continuity plan that is silent on communications does not cover the failure that stops customers reaching you. |
|
| Continuity, Emergency Service & Compliance: Continuity, emergency service and privacy are the three places where a communications decision stops being an operational preference and becomes an obligation. |
| Current Communications Environment | 4 of 5 · 53% aligned |
| What type of phone system is your organization currently running? | Partly in place |
Your answer: On-premise private branch exchange (PBX) — hardware we own and manage on-site A private branch exchange (PBX) past its manufacturer’s end-of-life date receives no security patches, no feature updates and limited parts. None of that is visible while it works, which is why replacement is usually triggered by a failure rather than by a date — and a failure is the most expensive moment to be choosing a platform. How Sunco closes this On-premise private branch exchange (PBX) systems carry increasing risk as they age: vendor support ends, parts become scarce, and the system cannot natively support remote workers. A cloud migration plan removes this compounding risk. |
Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission — Telecom Decisions Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) 2005-21 and 2005-61 · What 9-1-1 service the platform can deliver depends on whether the connection is fixed or nomadic A fixed VoIP line delivers enhanced 9-1-1 from its registered address; a nomadic one delivers basic 9-1-1, where the operator asks the caller where they are. Platform choice therefore decides an emergency-service outcome, not only a feature set. |
|
| How often does your current phone system cause a problem somebody has to work around — a call that dropped, a transfer that failed, a capability that is simply not there, or a call-out to get it fixed? | Partly in place |
Your answer: Monthly — there is a known list of things it cannot do, and staff have built habits around them. The old version of this question asked which problem was biggest — cost, features or reliability — and scored the answer, which meant a business whose main frustration was cost came out a point readier than one whose main frustration was features. They are not a ladder, they are three different problems. What is worth measuring is how often the system costs you something, because that is the number that makes or breaks the business case, and it is the one nobody writes down. How Sunco closes this A known list of things the system cannot do is a list of things somebody is doing manually instead, every month, without recording it. Those habits are the real cost, and they are invisible in the accounts because nobody bills for them. |
No published standard governs this question · A diagnostic question — no framework has a view on what annoys your staff most This one exists to find out where to start, not to score a control. The recommendation attached to each answer is Sunco’s. |
|
| Has your organization actually decided where its communications platform should be hosted and managed — public cloud, a dedicated private environment, or on your own premises — and does what you run today match that decision? | Mostly in place |
Your answer: Yes, we have decided — but what we run today does not match the decision yet. The old version of this question scored the preference itself: public cloud best, private cloud second, on premises third. That is a product preference dressed as a readiness score, and it is wrong in both directions — a business that deliberately chose on-premises for a reason is not less ready than one that drifted into hosted. What matters is whether the decision was made deliberately and whether what you run matches it. All three models are legitimate, and which one is right depends on your obligations, not on anybody’s catalogue. How Sunco closes this A decision the estate has not caught up with is still worth having made, because it turns the migration into a plan rather than a reaction. The thing to pin down next is the date and the trigger: what has to be true, and by when. |
Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada — Guidelines for processing personal data across borders · Accountability follows the personal information, wherever it is processed An organization stays responsible for personal information transferred to a third party for processing and must use contractual or other means to give it comparable protection there. It must also tell customers if their information may be sent to another jurisdiction, where the courts, law enforcement and national security authorities of that country can reach it. Where the platform is hosted is therefore a disclosure question as well as a technical one. |
|
| How do you currently handle communication during a site outage or system failure? | Partly in place |
Your answer: We notify customers and wait for the system to come back online A phone system with no failover plan is a single point of failure for your entire business communications. Cloud platforms with geo-redundant infrastructure and automatic failover eliminate this exposure — calls route to mobile or alternate sites without manual intervention. How Sunco closes this Asking customers to wait while your phones are down is a real revenue and reputation risk. Even a modest inbound call volume means lost business every hour the system is unavailable. |
ISO 22301:2019 — Business continuity management systems · Requirements of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) for planning and testing the continuity of a critical activity ISO 22301 requires a documented, exercised response for activities the organization has determined it cannot be without. Whether inbound calls are one of those is the organization’s call; if they are, an untested fallback does not satisfy it. ISO records the standard as under systematic review. |
|
| Current Communications Environment: What you are running now sets the floor for everything else — what it can do, what it costs to keep alive, and how much of a migration is replacement rather than addition. |
|
HIGH RISK · 7 Your biggest risks These are the answers we would address first. Most of them either stop calls reaching you or carry an obligation you cannot delegate, and the rest make everything else harder to change. |
| Advanced Communications Needs | 2 of 5 · 25% aligned |
| Is your organization using or exploring artificial intelligence (AI)-powered voice assistants or virtual agents to handle routine customer interactions without requiring a live agent? |
Your answer: We have not evaluated artificial intelligence (AI) voice capabilities for our customer interactions Modern artificial intelligence (AI) voice assistants understand natural language — callers speak normally and the system routes, responds, or resolves without pressing 1 or 2. For organizations handling repetitive inbound call types — appointment booking, status checks, account inquiries — automated handling takes those calls and leaves the ones that need judgement to a person. How much of your volume that is depends entirely on how much of it repeats, which is a question your own call records answer and no published figure can. How Sunco closes this Automated voice handling is no longer an enterprise-only capability, and the evaluation is cheap: pull a month of call records, sort by reason, and look at what repeats. If the top three reasons are a large share of the total, there is something here. If they are not, there is not — and that is worth knowing before anybody demonstrates anything to you. |
Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada — Recording of customer telephone calls · An automated assistant that captures or transcribes a call is recording it Transcription and capture by an automated voice assistant are recording for the purposes of the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC)’s guidance, so the disclosure, purpose, consent and retention requirements attach on the day it goes live rather than at the next review. |
|
| Do your customer-facing staff have access to artificial intelligence (AI)-powered assistance during live calls — such as real-time transcription, suggested responses, or automated after-call summaries? |
Your answer: Real-time artificial intelligence (AI) assistance has not been part of our communications technology conversation Real-time artificial intelligence (AI) agent assist tools listen to live calls, surface relevant information and suggested responses mid-conversation, flag compliance risks, and auto-generate call summaries after the interaction ends. Organizations using real-time AI assist report measurable reductions in average handle time and after-call work, and faster onboarding for new agents. How Sunco closes this This is the fastest-moving area of business communications technology. Organizations that introduce real-time artificial intelligence (AI) assist now are building institutional knowledge and competitive advantage that compounds over time. |
Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada — Recording of customer telephone calls · Real-time transcription and after-call summaries are processing of personal information A live transcript and an automatically generated summary are both records of a customer conversation. The organization remains accountable for them, including for what the tool retains and where it retains it. |
|
| Advanced Communications Needs: Structured inbound handling, recording and digital channels are where a phone system stops being a phone system and starts being how the business runs. |
| AI & Future Communications Readiness | 2 of 5 · 27% aligned |
| Does your organization use or plan to use artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbots or virtual agents to handle customer inquiries through web chat, text message (SMS), or messaging platforms? |
Your answer: We have no digital channel at all — customers who message us reach nobody, and we have not considered automated chat. artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots handle text-based customer interactions 24 hours a day without agent involvement — answering questions, booking appointments, qualifying inquiries, and escalating to live agents only when needed. For organizations already using web chat with human agents, adding an AI layer to handle routine queries typically doubles the interactions handled per agent. How Sunco closes this Customers arrive with expectations set by the apps they use daily, and a business with no digital channel is asking every one of them to phone instead. Whether that costs you anything depends on your customers — which is worth establishing before building a channel, and is usually visible in how many people ask by email for something they could have called about. |
Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) — S.C. 2010, c. 23 · Automated messaging on a digital channel is still a commercial electronic message An automated chat or messaging assistant that sends commercial messages is inside Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL), and the consent, identification and unsubscribe requirements apply to what the assistant sends as much as to what a person sends. |
|
| Is your organization using artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted outbound communications — automated reminders, intelligent follow-ups, or predictive outreach — to proactively reach customers or prospects? |
Your answer: We have no outbound programme — we have not considered proactive or automated outreach. artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted outbound communications are fundamentally different from mass blast campaigns. Intelligent outreach systems identify the right customer, the right time, and the right channel based on behaviour and preference data — improving response rates while reducing the volume of messages sent. All automated outbound commercial messaging in Canada remains subject to Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) consent and identification requirements. How Sunco closes this Automated reminders are usually the first outbound use case worth running, because the value is measurable in one number you already track — appointments missed, invoices unpaid, renewals lapsed. Start with whichever of those costs you most, and note that the moment an automated call goes out the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission’s identification requirements apply to it. |
Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission — Unsolicited Telecommunications Rules, Part IV, section 4 · Identification, contact details and calling hours for automated calls made for a purpose other than solicitation An automated appointment reminder must open by naming the person on whose behalf the call is made and briefly stating why, and must give an email or postal address together with a local or toll-free number that reaches a representative. Calling hours are 9:00 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. on weekdays and 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. at weekends, in the recipient’s time. No calls to emergency lines or healthcare facilities, equipment must release the line within ten seconds, and the contact details must stay valid for 60 days. For text and email the corresponding regime is Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL), not this one. |
|
| AI & Future Communications Readiness: artificial intelligence (AI) in communications is deployable at this scale today, which makes choosing what not to deploy the more valuable half of the decision. |
| Infrastructure & Network Readiness | 1 of 5 · 47% aligned |
| Is Quality of Service (QoS) configured on your network to prioritize voice traffic? |
Your answer: We are not sure what quality of service (QoS) is or whether it is configured Without quality of service (QoS), voice packets compete equally with all other network traffic. During a large file transfer, video stream, or backup job, your phone calls lose. QoS configuration instructs your network to treat voice packets as priority — the difference between clear calls and choppy ones during business hours. How Sunco closes this quality of service (QoS) is a fundamental prerequisite for cloud VoIP. Without it, call quality under load is unpredictable. This needs to be assessed and configured as part of any cloud communications migration. |
International Telecommunication Union (ITU)-T Recommendation G.114 — One-way transmission time · Why voice needs prioritising: the delay budget is fixed and small Voice cannot buffer. When the connection is congested, quality of service configuration is what decides whether the call or the file transfer gives way, and without it the answer is whichever packet arrived first. G.114’s 150 millisecond budget is what that decision is spending. |
|
| Infrastructure & Network Readiness: Cloud communications run over your internet connection, so the connection is part of the phone system whether or not anyone has treated it that way. |
| User Needs & Collaboration | 1 of 5 · 47% aligned |
| Do users need to handle calls across multiple devices — desk phone, desktop softphone, and mobile — and hand off calls between them? |
Your answer: We manage with workarounds — personal phones, forwarding rules Single-device workflows break the moment a staff member leaves their desk. A modern communications platform lets a call in progress move between a desk phone, a computer, and a mobile app without the caller ever knowing. This is called twinning or call continuity — and it is a standard cloud platform feature. How Sunco closes this Workarounds for multi-device communication are a tax on your staff every single day. Cloud platforms eliminate the workaround by making multi-device handling native and automatic. |
No published standard governs this question · Multi-device handoff is a capability question with no governing standard The recommendation is Sunco’s. The argument is that a handoff staff will not attempt is a capability you are paying for and not using. |
|
| User Needs & Collaboration: The right platform depends on how your people actually work now, which for most organizations is not how the current system was specified for. |
| Continuity, Emergency Service & Compliance | 1 of 6 · 50% aligned |
| For each of your sites and for any staff who use a softphone or mobile app, is the 9-1-1 service address on file with your provider current — and do your staff know which address an emergency call from their device would send help to? |
Your answer: We do not know what address is registered against our lines, or how to check or change it. On a fixed line the emergency operator sees the address automatically. On a nomadic connection — a softphone on a laptop, a mobile app, a desk phone somebody moved to another office — the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) confirms the service gets basic 9-1-1 only: the operator establishes the location by asking, and falls back to the registered address when the caller cannot say where they are. Which is exactly the call where they cannot. Providers are required to let you keep that address current; keeping it current is yours. How Sunco closes this This is the one gap in this assessment with a life-safety consequence rather than a commercial one. Your provider is required by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) to let you keep the most likely physical address current and to confirm it with you when a billing address changes — so the information exists and is yours to ask for. Do this one before anything else on this list. |
Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission — Telecom Decisions Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) 2005-21, 2005-61 and 2005-28 · 9-1-1 obligations of local VoIP service providers · basic versus enhanced 9-1-1 on nomadic connections Local VoIP providers must notify customers of 9-1-1 service limitations at sign-up, in marketing materials and in the terms of service, take the customer’s express consent acknowledging those limitations before service starts, and let customers update their most likely physical address online. On a nomadic connection the operator establishes location by asking, and uses the registered address only when the caller cannot say where they are — so whether that address is current is the organization’s exposure, not the provider’s. |
|
| Continuity, Emergency Service & Compliance: Continuity, emergency service and privacy are the three places where a communications decision stops being an operational preference and becomes an obligation. |
|
⚡ Quick Wins — Act On These Now | | Schedule a 30-minute call quality test during peak network usage hours — ask your IT support to confirm quality of service (QoS) rules are active and producing the expected results. Confirms that your quality of service (QoS) configuration is actually working before a cloud communications deployment exposes the gap. Typically 1 day. |
| | Ask your provider for the registered 9-1-1 service address on every line you have, read the list, and correct anything that is out of date. Then tell any staff using a softphone or mobile app which address an emergency call from their device would report. The only item on this assessment with a life-safety consequence rather than a commercial one, and the cheapest to close. Typically under an hour. |
| | Identify your top three highest-volume inbound call types and document how many require live agent handling vs. could be resolved with information alone — this scopes your artificial intelligence (AI) voice opportunity. Provides the business case for artificial intelligence (AI) voice deployment with real numbers from your own operation, not generic benchmarks. Typically 1 day. |
|
Assessment Framework & Standards Alignment Your answers have been read against what is actually published on business communications — two Canadian regulators, one international delay standard, one privacy regime and two international management standards. CRTC Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission Telecom Decisions 2005-21, 2005-61 and 2005-28 on what a provider must tell you about 9-1-1 from an internet-based phone service, and the Unsolicited Telecommunications Rules on identification and calling hours for automated outbound calls. | ITU-T G.114 One-way transmission time, International Telecommunication Union The delay budget speech has to fit inside — below 150 milliseconds one way for essentially transparent interactivity, 400 milliseconds as the general planning limit. Testable rather than a matter of opinion. | PRIVACY COMMISSIONER OF CANADA Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) guidance on call recording and on processing across borders What you must tell a caller before recording them, how long a recording may be kept, and your continuing responsibility for personal information once it is processed in another country. | CASL Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation, S.C. 2010, c. 23 Consent, identification and unsubscribe on commercial electronic messages. Note it does not apply to live or automated voice calls to telephone numbers — those fall under the CRTC’s Unsolicited Telecommunications Rules instead. | ISO 22301:2019 Business continuity management systems Determining the period the organization can tolerate being without an activity, then building, documenting and exercising a response that meets it — applied here to the phone system rather than to the building. | ISO/IEC 42001:2023 Artificial intelligence management systems The Annex A control objectives for governing how artificial intelligence is used, what data it may touch, and where a person stays in the loop — the questions that decide whether AI in the contact centre is an experiment or a system. |
This assessment surfaces readiness gaps and does not certify compliance with any standard. Six of its thirty-one questions have nothing published behind them at all and say so where they are asked; consult qualified counsel regarding your specific obligations. |
|
Indicative Communications Spend Snapshot |
See how you stand against your peers Everything here is either a published figure with its reference period, or one of your own. No prices, nothing estimated, and no arithmetic across quantities that do not belong in the same sum — which is what the previous version of this calculator did. |
| The figures below use typical values for a business of about this size, because the snapshot was left unfilled. Re-run it with your own numbers for a comparison that reflects your organization. |
What the alternatives cost | Your spend across 50 users | $125 per user / month | | | | One communications specialist in Alberta, fully loaded | $141,000 | | That one hire, expressed the way you buy IT | $235 per user / month |
You spend about $125 per user per month on communications. One fully loaded communications specialist in Alberta is about $141,000 a year — $235 per user per month across your 50 people, for one person’s salary, before any platform, circuits or handsets, and with nobody covering the weeks they are away. What the right platform costs for your environment depends on your environment, and that is worth half an hour of conversation rather than a number on a web page. |
How you stand against your peers | Canadian businesses using cloud computing — the most commonly used technology measured | 48% | | The phone system is often the last workload still on hardware on site. Reference year 2023. | | Canadian businesses offering staff the option to telework | 28% | | 23% of small businesses, 45% of medium-sized, 64% of large. The phone system is usually the last thing to find out. | | Customers likely to take their business elsewhere after poor service | 75% | | 48% need only one or two bad experiences. 7,000 people across 17 markets, fielded September 2024. | | Alberta businesses of 20 to 99 people using AI to produce goods or deliver services | 21.1% | | 25.8% nationally for the same size band, in the year to the second quarter of 2026 — about one business in five. | | What a communications outage costs a business this size | not published | | The widely quoted hourly downtime figures — over 90% of firms above $300,000 an hour — measure mid-size and large enterprises across more than 1,000 firms globally. No equivalent exists for a thirty-person Alberta business, so this snapshot does not pretend one does. What your last outage cost you is the number worth bringing to the conversation. |
Indicative estimate based on published benchmarks and your own figures. Numbers are rounded and intended to frame a conversation, not to predict your costs. What managed coverage would cost for your environment is a conversation, not a figure on a web page. |
Sunco’s Recommendation Not yet ready: Several foundations are missing, and moving before they are fixed moves the problems with you. |
|
Book Your Communications Review A Sunco advisor will walk through your results and identify the highest-impact next steps for your organization. 30 minutes • Free • No obligation |
Research Sources and Methodology Every figure and framework reference in this report is listed below with a link to the original source, so you can verify any of it yourself. International Telecommunication Union — Recommendation ITU-T G.114 (05/2003) — One-way transmission time One-way mouth-to-ear delay below 150 ms gives essentially transparent interactivity for speech; 400 ms is the recommended upper limit for general network planning. Tier 1 source · International · verified 2026-08-23 |
Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission — 9-1-1 Obligations of Local VoIP Service Providers in Canada — Telecom Decisions CRTC 2005-21, 2005-61 and 2005-28 Local VoIP service providers must notify customers of any 9-1-1 or enhanced 9-1-1 service limitations at sign-up and installation, in marketing materials and in the terms of service; must obtain the customer’s express consent before service begins acknowledging those limitations; and must ensure customers can update their most likely physical address online, and be contacted to confirm it whenever a billing address changes. Tier 1 source · Canada · verified 2026-08-23 |
Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission — 9-1-1 Services for Traditional Wireline, VoIP and Wireless Phone Services Nomadic VoIP provides basic 9-1-1 only: with no fixed address associated with the service the operator establishes location by asking, and the registered service address is used when the caller cannot say where they are. Fixed VoIP delivers enhanced 9-1-1 from the registered address. Tier 1 source · Canada · verified 2026-08-23 |
Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission — Unsolicited Telecommunications Rules, Part IV, section 4 For automatic dialing-announcing device calls made for a purpose other than solicitation, the message must begin by identifying the person on whose behalf it is made together with a brief description of its purpose, and must include an email or postal mailing address and a local or toll-free number at which a representative can be reached; permitted hours are 9:00 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. on weekdays and 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. at weekends in the time of the person receiving the call; no calls may be made to emergency lines or healthcare facilities; equipment must disconnect within ten seconds; and the contact details must stay valid for 60 days. Tier 1 source · Canada · verified 2026-08-23 |
Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission — Frequently Asked Questions about Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation The maximum administrative monetary penalty per violation is $1 million for an individual and $10 million for a business. CASL does not apply to unsolicited telecommunications, including live voice and automated telemarketing calls to telephone numbers, which are regulated under the Unsolicited Telecommunications Rules instead. Tier 1 source · Canada · verified 2026-08-23 |
Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada — Recording of customer telephone calls — PIPEDA guidance An organization recording customer calls must inform the customer that the call is being recorded, clearly state the purpose and ask for consent; consent is implied if the customer proceeds knowing the call is recorded and why; a caller who objects must be offered an alternative; and how long a recording is kept will vary, with retention limited to the stated purpose. Tier 1 source · Canada · verified 2026-08-23 |
Statistics Canada — Survey of Digital Technology and Internet Use, 2023 Cloud computing was the most commonly used information and communications technology among Canadian businesses in 2023, at 48%. 28% of businesses offered employees the option to telework — 23% of small businesses, 45% of medium-sized and 64% of large. Tier 1 source · Canada · verified 2026-08-23 |
Statistics Canada — Table 33-10-1167-01, Canadian Survey on Business Conditions, Q2 2026 21.1% of Alberta businesses with 20 to 99 employees used AI to produce goods or deliver services in the 12 months to Q2 2026; 25.8% nationally for the same size band. Tier 1 source · Canada / Alberta · verified 2026-08-23 |
Vonage — Global Customer Engagement Report 2025 75% of customers are likely to take their business elsewhere after poor service, and 48% need only one or two bad experiences before leaving for good. The most-cited frustrations are long waits to reach an agent and having to contact customer service more than once, both 65%, followed by describing the issue to multiple agents or being transferred, 63%. On channel direction, 32% of customers expect to increase their use of chatbots over the next six to twelve months (up from 23%), 28% video chat (up from 26%) and 26% voice assistants (up from 22%). 13th annual edition, more than 7,000 participants across 17 markets, fielded September 2024. Tier 2 source · Global · verified 2026-08-23 |
Information Technology Intelligence Consulting — ITIC 2024 Hourly Cost of Downtime Report, Part 1 The average cost of a single hour of downtime exceeds $300,000 for over 90% of mid-size and large enterprises, and 41% put it between $1 million and over $5 million. Over 1,000 firms surveyed globally between November 2023 and mid-March 2024. Measures mid-size and large enterprises — not small business. Tier 2 source · Global · verified 2026-08-23 |
Gartner — Gartner Predicts Agentic AI Will Autonomously Resolve 80% of Common Customer Service Issues Without Human Intervention by 2029 Forecast, not measurement: “By 2029, agentic AI will autonomously resolve 80% of common customer service issues without human intervention, leading to a 30% reduction in operational costs.” Tier 2 source · Global · verified 2026-08-23 |
ISO — ISO 22301:2019 — Security and resilience, Business continuity management systems, Requirements Requirements for a business continuity management system — planning, establishing, implementing, operating, monitoring, reviewing, maintaining and improving it. ISO records the standard as under systematic review, so clause detail may change. Tier 1 source · International · verified 2026-08-23 |
Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Alberta — Overview of Privacy Laws Alberta health information is governed by the Health Information Act, which applies to custodians. The Personal Information Protection Act governs how a private organization handles personal and personal employee information, and does not govern health information. Tier 1 source · Alberta · verified 2026-08-23 |
Employment and Social Development Canada / Statistics Canada — Job Bank wage report, NOC 21231, Alberta, 2023–2024 reference period; Labour Force Survey Alberta median wage $51.92 an hour for a computer telecommunications software specialist, National Occupational Classification 21231 — low $36.06, high $100.00. Tier 1 source · Alberta · verified 2026-08-23 |
ISO/IEC — ISO/IEC 42001:2023 — Information technology, Artificial intelligence, Management system Nine control objectives and 38 controls for an AI management system (Annex A) — policy, roles, data handling, third-party and supplier controls, and human oversight. Tier 1 source · International · verified 2026-08-23 |
Microsoft — Contact centres for Microsoft Teams — Microsoft Learn Microsoft states that for some organizations Teams’ own cloud calling capabilities, “including auto attendant and call queues, meet their needs”, and that organizations “that want solutions with business tools and workflows to drive the customer journey” integrate a contact centre with Teams Phone. Microsoft does not position Teams Phone itself as a contact centre. Tier 1 source · International · verified 2026-08-23 |
Microsoft — PSTN connectivity options for Microsoft Teams — Microsoft Learn Microsoft publishes exactly four ways to connect Microsoft Teams to the public telephone network: a Microsoft Teams Calling Plan with Microsoft as the operator; Operator Connect, through a certified third-party landline operator; Teams Phone Mobile, through a certified mobile operator, which supports user numbers only; and Direct Routing, using any operator through a session border controller the organization procures and manages. Tier 1 source · International · verified 2026-08-23 |
Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada — Guidelines for processing personal data across borders An organization is responsible for personal information in its possession or custody, including information transferred to a third party for processing, and shall use contractual or other means to provide a comparable level of protection while it is processed. Organizations must advise customers that their personal information may be sent to another jurisdiction for processing and that while there it may be accessed by the courts, law enforcement and national security authorities. A transfer for processing is a use, not a disclosure, so additional consent for the transfer itself is not required. Tier 1 source · Canada · verified 2026-08-23 |
ISO/IEC — ISO/IEC 33020:2019 — Process measurement framework for assessment of process capability Achievement scale: Not achieved ≤15%, Partially achieved >15–50%, Largely achieved >50–85%, Fully achieved >85%. Source of this assessment’s band thresholds. Tier 1 source · International · verified 2026-08-23 |
Statistics are reproduced as published by the sources above and were verified on the dates shown. Regulatory positions reflect the law in force at the time of verification and may change. This assessment surfaces readiness gaps and does not certify compliance with any standard; consult qualified counsel regarding your specific obligations. |
Sunco Communication and Installation Ltd. 18961 111 Ave NW, Edmonton, AB T5S X4 1-866-310-7007 | marketingteam@sunco.ca | sunco.ca |
© 2026 Sunco Communication & Installation Ltd. All rights reserved. |
|
|