Contact centers are often the backbone of businesses. Whether your agents are fielding customer service calls, strengthening customer relationships, or reaching out to new prospects, they are essential to your growth and success.
But your agents aren’t the only important factor when it comes to operating your contact center. You also rely on the technology and services that carry your communications across the world.
That’s where your voice carrier comes in. Choosing the right business VoIP provider ensures the reliability, reach, and flexibility of your contact center. To do so, however, you first need to know what you should expect from your service providers.
In this blog, we’ll explore the top features you should expect from your voice termination carrier. We’ll also show you how these features have benefited one of our own customers in their daily operations.
What should contact centers look for in a voice carrier?
Both inbound and outbound call centers should look for a voice carrier that will support and improve your voice calling capabilities around the world, the QoS of your calls, and the dependability of your infrastructure. When you need to scale your contact center or move into a new market, you should have confidence that your carrier will be an asset, not an obstacle, to your growth.
And you need to access all of these features at a price that fits your budget. While this might all sound excessive, choosing your provider based on the following factors will help you find the best VoIP service on the market.
1. Reliability
When you make hundreds or thousands of VoIP calls, you need to know that your voice infrastructure will always function at its best with maximum uptime. Working with an established VoIP wholesaler gives you access to a variety of carrier networks, while giving you depth in routing and the best infrastructure available.
Your voice provider should select the most dependable carriers for the locations you target. They should also commit to using only the best options for their customers. The routes they offer should use a variety of excellent networks to deliver consistently reliable voice termination.
Most importantly, look for a provider that enforces stringent quality controls and conducts regular testing of the routes to ensure highest QoS and dependability. When you have a reliable voice infrastructure, you can have confidence in contact center calls.
2. Scalability
All contact centers have seasonal variance in call volumes. As a contact center manager, fighting with your voice carrier to scale your VoIP services is the last thing you want to deal with during a peak.
Instead, find a provider that has built-in scalability. An ideal voice carrier would let you scale up or down with ease, based on your changing requirements. For your large scale campaigns, for example, your voice carrier will ensure a high calls per second (CPS) and a high multiple calls in progress (MCIP) limit for your traffic so that your call center can meet your goals and expectations. With unlimited channels at your disposal, you can add or remove seats as needed. A voice termination provider that uses a dependable cloud infrastructure also enables you to scale on-demand for minimal disruptions.
Easy scalability can come at a hefty price. Some incremental cost can be expected when scaling your call center, but beware of companies that try to lock you into long-term contracts, paying for seats you don’t need. Flexible, upfront pricing helps you meet your budget today and maintain it moving forward.
3. Reach
Today, businesses can easily build customer bases around the world and establish a local presence in a snap. Getting in touch with customers and prospects in these different locations, however, can seem to be difficult and expensive.
The best VoIP providers offer call centers the option to add Direct Inward Dialing (DIDs) or Direct Dial-In (DDIs) numbers to their contact center solutions.
What are DIDs?
DIDs are local, mobile, and toll-free numbers that aren’t associated with any physical location. Without this attachment, calls that originate from your call center on one side of the world show up as local numbers on the caller ID.
This bit of technological trickery allows call centers to make VoIP calls to prospective customers in other countries without alerting them to the difference in locations. Inbound call centers can also use these numbers to serve customers globally while avoiding high per-call costs.
These virtual phone numbers offer numerous benefits for businesses in international markets, including:
- Eliminating the need to have a physical presence in every location you target
- Giving you the option to outsource your call center services for lower costs
- Increasing the chances of making contact with leads
- Minimizing obstacles to reaching new markets
How can voice carriers increase a call center’s reach?
In addition to offering DIDs, VoIP providers support your call center by allowing you to use your existing and vanity phone numbers across the world. By ensuring accurate Automatic Number Identification (ANI) and caller ID support, they can also ensure that your customers always see the right number when you call.
Additional DID capabilities to look for include unlimited concurrent call support, flexible pricing, and virtual phone number options in a large number of locations worldwide.
4. Quality
There are two ways to evaluate the quality of your contact center VoIP service. First, you need a network that will maintain clear communication without many of the issues found with internet-based phone calls. You also need a service that will provide the customer support you need to thrive.
Call quality
Network issues translate to poor voice quality. Since call centers work almost exclusively over the phone, bad connections quickly lead to low customer satisfaction and fewer conversions.
When evaluating providers, check for common issues that will affect your call quality, such as:
- Distorted voices
- Echoing sound
- Robotic-sounding voices
- Lagging sound that causes both voices to overlap
- Dropped calls
- Broken, choppy connection
Typically, these problems are caused by an overloaded network or one that hasn’t been properly prioritized. As long as you have high bandwidth, your voice carrier is the one to blame for these issues.
Support quality
Avoid the above problems by asking potential vendors about any issues they see and how they address them. You can also ask their current customers about their experiences. The best providers offer 24/7 quality management and are constantly monitoring and fixing problems proactively to optimize your call sound, length, and completion rate.
This 24/7 support should also extend to any questions or concerns you have. Search for companies that will invest the time and effort to help you succeed, no matter the size of your business or need.
How can I find the right voice provider?
High-quality VoIP carriers provide a network that ensures seamless voice termination, supports your contact center through its growth phases, and works with you to meet your voice needs. If you select your provider based on their ability to increase your profitability and efficiency, you will find the VoIP service that will benefit your call center the most.
Talking of benefits, here is one to get you started.
So what does an ideal VoIP service provider look like?
Below, we’ve included a short case study that shows how IDT Express helped one of our call center customers resolve their issues and find greater success with our A-Z Voice Termination solution.
Case study: SaaS A
SaaS A is one of the largest software providers for cloud contact center services. A multi-million-dollar enterprise, they employ several thousand workers globally and are headquartered on the east coast. The industries they serve include banking and finance, automotive dealerships, debt collection companies, and many more.
They approached IDT Express because their debt collection customers, in particular, sent a significant amount of voice traffic to Tier 1 and Tier 2 countries in Europe. SaaS A was struggling to find a reliable voice termination provider that could meet these needs.
IDT Express understood SaaS A’s requirements right at the onset, curated a reliable voice termination plan, provided customized solutions at every step, and delivered exceptional results. Some of the customized services offered include:
Local, in-country termination
The debt collection company had local agents in each country using local DID numbers to make and receive calls, but needed national termination services with original ANI support.
Solution
IDT Express provided this in-country termination, going country by country to hand-select local partners and network operators from its extensive roster of global network providers. With this solution, we offered secure, accurate ANI delivery and high-quality voice termination for every call.
Low Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) on these calls
Most people tend to hang up when a debt collection company is calling, creating a large number of short-duration calls. This traffic became a headache for SaaS A’s principal engineers, who were being rejected by one provider after another.
Solution
Through its custom voice termination routing, IDT Express created a network of carriers that met this specific need. It required meticulous planning, deliberation, and coordination with voice partners.
Multiple calls from the same ANI
Another common call center problem involves thousands of calls being made with the same originating ANI. This traffic often sets off fraud prevention triggers at most telecom operations centers, disrupting these connections.
Solution
In this case, seamless termination required special handholding at every node in the routing. Using its relationships with telecommunications companies across the globe, IDT built and executed this customization to restore SaaS A’s reach.
Scalabilit
For this traffic, SaaS A needed higher CPS and MCIP limits, increasing the number of calls and channels they could use to reach customers. They also needed these services to maintain a flexible and scalable capacity.
Solution
IDT Express ensured SaaS A had unlimited channel capacity and a generous CPS at no extra charge. The company was able to move their campaigns from nascent stages, with only a few hundred calls a day, to advanced stages with a few thousand simultaneous calls, all in a few short months.
By now you can appreciate the fact that the voice carrier you choose can either improve your call center operations or hinder your efforts to reach your prospects and customers. Therefore, partnering with an established voice provider is essential for the smooth functioning of your contact center.
For more information about IDT Express and how our wholesale voice termination services can benefit your contact center, submit the form below.
It’s important to note that IDT does not accept call center/marketing traffic/short duration traffic or wholesale traffic to the US and Canada. We will only accept direct origination traffic to the US and Canada. We at IDT strongly support local regulatory bodies, government agencies, and industry coalition groups in their efforts to eradicate illegal robocalls.
