In the world of business, the ability to communicate effectively and efficiently with a wide variety of people, organizations, customers, etc., is fundamental to staying afloat in a competitive marketplace.In the absence of a robust communications platform, a business is inevitably destined to shrivel up and wilt-a victim of its own inability to interact with other players.Yet any business owner or operator knows that communications costs can rack up at an impressive pace, especially when frequent calls are being made to foreign and/or mobile recipients.And, of course, in today’s globalized world, calling folks overseas is part and parcel of ordinary business activity and is most certainly something that can not be extirpated from the business agenda, at the same time, thanks to the tremendous advances in mobile connectivity and the ability of workers to stay productive and plugged in from virtually anywhere, calling mobile destinations is also an absolute must within business activities, completely ineligible for being slashed from the budget.So, what’s a business to do to guarantee that they have a robust communications solution that doesn’t dig too deeply into the bottom line?
The answer comes in the form of least cost routing, the business solution par excellence for all kinds of telephone communications.The larger the volume of your outbound phone traffic, and the more frequently your offices happen to be making calls to foreign and mobile recipients, the more you should be interested in least cost routing.And what exactly is least cost routing, you ask yourself?Least cost routing is simple: it’s a solution for overly expensive telephone bills that is implemented (in a variety of ways, as will be seen) by finding a carrier with a route to the destination number that is priced as low as possible (within certain quality and reliability parameters, to be configured as seen fit by the business in question).In order to really understand least cost routing, however, it is important first of all to come to a clearer understanding of telecoms carriers, and to think of them not only as providers of a service but also as customers.
That’s right: though you pay your carrier for their services, your carrier in turn will pay another carrier on the global telecom market for the use of certain routes.Essentially, it’s a matter of different telecoms carriers trading what are known as “termination services,” which refers to the final leg of a phone call before reaching the recipient.One carrier may have routing options for a country or series of countries in, say, the Far East, and will end up selling part or all of those routes to another carrier, who in turn may turn around and sell them to another.This active trading among telecoms carriers is what makes least cost routing possible, and specifically minor discrepancies in price schedules (either due to human/machine error or simply as the result of varying valuations on behalf of these companies) allow for the margins in pricing that make it possible for least cost routing to save a significant amount in monthly phone bills.
Occasionally-although this is not very common-it just so happens that a serious error is made by a given carrier in interpreting a price schedule, and a major window of opportunity is opened up for other carriers to make good money and save their clients plenty at the same time.In what is known as cherry picking (which brings major savings to end users in certain circumstances), one carrier will consider a certain phone code range to be more expensive than another carrier considers it, and hence the latter carrier can pass off calls to that range to the former carrier, charging their high rates while paying much lower rates.This is unusual, and is not really so much a risk as it is a fluke within the telecoms market.
Implementing a least cost routing (LCR) solution for your business telephone communications can either be done by an in-house (rarely) or carrier’s (more normal) specialized LCR team, and separately it is possible to have automated LCR hardware and software installed on site at your business premises that will do the routing all on its own.It is still much more common to see human LCR teams performing these functions, though the software path is becoming increasingly popular with time and seems likely to become a common feature of large businesses within the next few years.If a business does decide to go ahead with LCR software installation, there are certain basic functions which need to be met and that should be kept in mind during the purchase.First of all, the software must be able to load and process tables of phone code ranges and price schedules automatically from a default source; furthermore, the software must be able to compare dialing codes in the proper manner and convert the carriers’ price schedule, which is expressed in terms of destination names, into a schedule expressed in terms of dialing codes.Additionally, the software must be able to measure call quality parameters and determine which routes to go with based on values stipulated during configuration (provided by the business, or if necessary, upon recommendation by an expert).Finally, the software must be able to gather and arrange the pertinent data and pass it along into the billing/invoice system.
The possibilities with such software vary drastically, from the most basic systems that only include a few of these features to very expensive systems that cover them all and much more still; generally, and with good reason, the cheaper the software the greater the complexity of the manual work which must be done to make the system roll properly, so beware of “saving” money on cheap software in this regard.
With the increasing shift towards VOIP telephony platforms in business settings, least cost routing is becoming ever more automated and easy to implement, and the hassle of dealing with various carriers’ bills can be eliminated thanks to the consolidation and arrangement of all costs via this new kind of platform.
Author: Sam D Goddard
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Latest trends in mobile phone
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