Phone costs reductions

It is undisputable that VOIP has reduced the phone bills of call center outsourcers. In the last 4 years the cost of 1 minute of a national call decreased by 50% reaching a level well below 1 euro cent. And the even better thing is that calling all Western Europe now has the same cost as calling nationally. The cost saving in the same period on internationa call has reached 90%.

The table below shows the cost of a minute in euro cents for a center with a high volume of calls.

Call costs for a call center

Higher scalability

But VOIP didn’t reduce phone costs only. Also the whole infrastructure is now cheaper.
If a call center that generates 1.000 concurrent calls uses ISDN for termination, it needs to invest thousands of euros in equipment. And a similar investment must be done by the service provider. 

If VOIP is used, scalability is extremely easier: increasing the number of lines requires only some additional bandwidth and some processing power on gateway servers. Both low-cost commodities.

But this cost saving dodn’t come free: quality of the phone service suffered greatly. And the most relevant issue is not the quality of the voice sound: offshore call centers need to use high compression codecs (G.729 or GSM) anyway.

Higher call set-up time

One of the main problems that we need to tackle is the increase in call set-up times. Today it is common to wait more than 10 seconds before a call is established. And, because of the high number of calls made by an agent, all these wait times compound to multiple minutes every hour.

Reduction of ASR

The ASR (Answer Seizure Ratio) is the number of answered calls divided by the total number of originated calls. With the conversion of providers’ networks to VOIP we see a gradual decrease of this percentage.

In this case the call center must increase the number of attempts for each contact, therefore decreasing agents’ productivity.

Is going back to ISDN a solution?

Unfortunately these factors are largely independent from the technology used to connect to the phone service provider. In fact, even if we use ISDN to connect, it is more and more likely that the provider’s internal network has been largely converted to VOIP.

An this is even more likely for international calls. Due to the high price pressure, all telcos are now forced to trade off quality for cost saving.

What can call senters do?

In addition to doing a thorough due diligence when choosing telcos, it is increasingly more important to use more than one provider. Even the largest and well known companies often have problems on their network. Maybe only on a few destinations.

We now need to have an active management of call termination, diverting different routes to the best performing provider at any given time.

Another tool that is now essential is a good predictive dialer. These systems can increase productivity in a call center increasing the number of dialed calls by means of statistic algorithms that compensate both the ASR and the call set-up time.

Tags: call center, predictive dialer, VOIP