The success rate of your campaigns can be heavily impacted by the reliability and the quality of your call connectivity. Today’s Voice over IP (VoIP) services for call centres are proving popular, helping them to cut costs and improve efficiency. But despite this boost in communications technology, a predictive dialler campaign and your brand can be seriously impacted by your choice of provider for the multiple VoIP lines you’ll need.
Consider carefully the provider you use for VoIP lines, to make sure their infrastructure is up to scratch for the demands that predictive dialler activity will create. Here are some pitfalls of choosing the wrong provider:
You might be subjected to short-notice suspension
Dialler calls are different to every-day business calls. They’re shorter, involve multiple, simultaneous connect attempts and have comparatively low connect rates. These calls are widely unappealing to carriers. What makes them unappealing is their traffic profile. A traffic profile shows the quality of the traffic, based on the following statistics:
- Average call duration
- Call connect rate (or answer seizure rate)
- Calls per second
Profiles that fail to meet certain quality levels are unfavourable . As a result, carriers are known to suspend services or reduce available lines to call centres, sometimes with very little notice.
A single carrier amounts to a single point of failure
There’s far more to choosing a VoIP line provider than price alone. If you choose a provider that relies on one carrier, then you’re at the mercy of that carrier. Whether it’s a problem with your traffic profile, or your carrier suffers faults or continuity issues, you can pretty much guarantee frequent disruptions or sustained outage to your service. Without an alternative service as backup, the cost of an outage will exceed your initial call cost savings and, worse, could threaten your business.
VoIP providers offer varying degrees of quality
VoIP call quality is not consistent across service providers and they rarely have any obligation to perform within quality parameters. Your decision to choose a single, low-cost VoIP service provider could lead to quality issues such as caller line ID inconsistencies, packet loss, jitter and latency. These problems are a sure way to affect your reputation and get you in trouble with communications regulator Ofcom.
If that’s not enough, there’s also a risk of fraud
Your phone line security is imperative. Inadequate security measures will compromise your dialler or VoIP line service account. Fraudulent calls normally happen overnight, when no one is watching and when there’s lengthy period of quiet time. A perpetrator could easily empty the credit on your prepaid VoIP account during this time. Just imagine what they could do to your post-pay account
So, how do you choose the right provider?
There’s a simple way to prevent these scenarios. The answer is a service provider that owns and maintains its VoIP network comprising multiple data centres and using multiple carriers. Hostcomm, for instance, has six data centres across the UK, Europe and the USA which are managed and monitored locally. And, to mitigate the risks of service disruptions, Hostcomm calls are distributed simultaneously across five tier-1 carriers and through three soft switches - software-based switches that contain information about users and phone numbers. These manage network traffic securely across the multiple resources. Hostcomm can even deliver an attractive traffic profile to carriers by mixing its business PBX traffic with dialler call traffic.
Your business is too valuable to take risks. It’s possible to maintain high voice quality, and a continuous, secure service, and still keep costs down. It’s simply a matter of choosing a provider that understands call centres and provides a specialist service to keep your business connected and your campaign on track.
For more information about Hostcomm’s infrastructure and multiple VoIP lines to support your predictive dialler, contact us on 0808 168 4400.
