For many years it’s been known by carriers, very large call centers and other heavy users of long distance that the Least Cost Routing (LCR) for outbound calls is an effective way to reduce your usage rates and have redundancy and disaster recovery in case your primary carrier were to fail. But what you may not know is that LCR is also available for Toll Free traffic as well. The technology has been around since 1993 but hasn’t been widely adopted in the past. Savvy carriers and call centers have realized the value of putting in other carriers that are not Tier 1 providers because the call quality is so close among most Tier 2 providers that the risk has been removed.
Last September CenturyLink was down 15 hours or longer, call centers had to wait for CenturyLink’s porting person (only one person) to point Toll Free numbers to another carrier while their entire network was down. Their network was down because they were forced by the FCC to convert all customers Toll Free using TDM to SIP. Something went very wrong in the update to the new platform. The call centers on CenturyLink had moved all Toll Free numbers to another carrier. This new Toll Free carrier might only have one person doing their porting too. It was very frustrating to say the least. Before this happens to you, your call center must prepare and diversify your Toll Free carriers and empower you to fully control your Toll Free numbers.
You can implement LCR for Toll Free numbers by becoming your own RespOrg, but it can require hours to manage so if that is not an expense you want to invest in there are a few specialized providers who will provide the LCR for you at a very nominal charge which is more than offset by the savings in utilizing their multiple carriers. Is it worth the effort for setting up LCR for Toll Free? It all depends on your situation. If your mix of usage is some USA and mostly International it might not be right for you, but if your usage is mostly USA or the portion that is USA traffic is in the thousands of dollars per month then the ROI of the time & effort is a fast payback. You can typically expect to pay $0.0060/min to $0.0080/min with Toll Free LCR. You should add 2 carriers, the new LCR can only take 33,000 NPA NXXs of the 170.000 NPA NXX in the RespOrg system.
Call Center Pros arranged an Independent RespOrg that has affordable tiers for call centers, so your call center is no longer dependent for a single carrier and trapped on that carrier’s RespOrg ID. Today most call centers have Toll Free numbers on 2-3 different carriers for a back-up plan. CCP can also introduce you to a reliable AT&T, Level3 and Verizon resellers, that deliver diversified Toll Free via SIP better than AT&T, Level3 or Verizon can deliver themselves. Everyone loves AT&T’s zero trouble tickets, but do not like AT&T’s big company mentality. Once you have an independent RespOrg, CCP can help develop a template. Every business has different Toll Free callers, every call center will have a different template. We will need a month of CDRs, to compile the top 33,000 NPA NXX from a month of CDRs for a big sampling. From AT&T, Level3 and Verizon we will find the least cost route for your Toll Free. Then we will look at the lesser used 140,000 NPA NXX and find one of the three carriers to take that traffic. Sometime there is an old commitment where one carrier might need more minutes. This bucket of 140,000 lesser used NPA NXXs can also be percentage based routed, maybe 50% to AT&T, 25% each to the other carriers. The way this works, you will have Toll Free redundancy from three carriers; your RespOrg will be under your company’s control, and through your RespOrg interface your company can repoint the NPA NXXs which are down, to one of your other carriers. This system does not work if your carrier has flat pricing. The Toll Free LRC saves on your cost per minute and a gives better redundancy plan.
For a free analysis & evaluation of your call center voice traffic please call +1-404-936 4000.
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