3 Issues To Consider When Acquiring A Least Cost Routing Solution
Choosing a least cost routing (LCR) solution is a complicated process that requires the company to know how the phone is used, by whom, calling where and what the cost is.
LCR is a process whereby a phone call is diverted from a major carrier to go on the pipes of another provider, be in a cellular provider or Voice over Internet Protocol provider, to cut costs. This process is mostly used in the international telecommunications space.
The company that wishes to use LCR needs to learn which call destinations are the most popular within the company and why. Is it because the company has operations there?
And where there is telephone abuse by an employee, the company needs to deal with the situation, as an LCR solution does not necessarily address that problem.
That said, here some of the key issues to take into consideration when shopping for an LCR solution:
1. Service level agreement
The first and foremost considerations in any LCR solution should be the service levels and guarantees offered by the provider.
Service level agreements should include how effectively the LCR provider will capture the company’s outgoing calls and reroute them more cheaply. As the savings depends on captured calls, this leg of the service level agreement is very critical.
It is also important to find out the guarantees time it will take for the LCR provider to respond f and when the settings are off.
The service level agreement also should ensure that regular LCR audits take place, to ensure that ported numbers are identified, provider rates are verified and promised discounts / guaranteed savings are in effect.
The audits should not take place just before the contract ends. The company may choose to have one internal audit and one external audit annually.
2. Savings strategies
Keep the carrier destination in mind.Your company can extract maximum value from using VoIP by keeping the destination where the carrier lands calls in mind.
For example, if your selected carrier lands calls in Germany, VoIP calls to that region would be very cheap. That’s very useful if you make a large number of calls to Germany, but useless if your international calls land in the UK and Japan.
The cost conscious client will want assurance that data management comes at a cost to the LCR provider
The way you are billed is also important. The LCR provider must be transparent about how he bills your calls, to how calls are billed, whether it’s per minute or per second. This is especially important because rates may be cheaper initially, but a per minute basis may remove the advantage, making the option more expensive over the length of the call.
3. The quality of speech
The actual equipment and methodologies used to reroute the calls are secondary considerations to quality of speech, call completion rates, overflow guarantees and cost guarantees.
If, for example, the calls are rerouted to a Voice over Internet Protocol network, what is the quality of the call? What proportion of phone calls are completed and what percentage of calls are dropped, so the caller has to initiate the call again?
Read Damaria Senne’s business articles at http://www.itweb.co.za Damaria also blogs about the impact of the mobile phone on the way South Africans work, play, learn and communicate at http://www.mydigitallife.co.za/mobilelife She also blogs about her adventures as a parent and writer at http://damariasenne.blogspot.com
Tags: cost savings, LCR, least cost routing, telecommunications, VOIP