Benjamin Franklin once said, “The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten”.
At AurorA we have taken this maxim to heart. We offer only Premium International Voice Termination. Direct white (i.e. legal) routes to the far end country that pass true Calling Line ID (CLID). These routes are typically more expensive than cheaper VoIP routes that are commercially available. If is our belief that this approach maximizes both revenue and margin for our wholesale customers.
This is counter-intuitive for many in the telecom environment who have traditionally embraced Least Cost Routing (LCR) for their international voice traffic. How could they make more money by buying more expensive termination ?
Let’s first look at top-line revenue. In todays telecom market, the consumer that is price driven will be using free alternative communications service such as Skype, WhatsApp, FaceTime and Google Voice to call overseas. It doesn’t matter how low your price is when you are competing against “free”. These customers are not coming back. So who still calls overseas ? Business customers, especially small to medium size businesses.
Large enterprises have their own private networks. Their internal communications will ride their private corporate networks or Microsoft Teams or Slack. For external communications they will still need to make calls. Commercial customers demand excellent quality from your entire service offering. Phone calls must complete each time, every time with superb “pin drop” audio quality.
If you have poor quality from an LCR that relies on cheaper routes and your commercial customer has a bad call experience they will stop using your service. So an effort to save some pennies per minute results in the loss of top-line dollars. Top-line dollars that you already spent marketing and sales efforts to win.
Many cheap routes rely on grey or black routing that do not pass true CLID. The calling party is spoofed at the far end to bypass charges from telcos, regulators or governments so that they can provide lower prices. What happens when you receive a call where you do not recognize the calling number ? If you are like me, and many others, if you don’t recognize the number you don’t answer it. It is hard to make money on phone calls when they don’t complete because the other end will not answer the call. True CLID is imperative !
Let’s look at margin next. Direct costs are lower if you choose premium quality over a cheaper but lower quality route. The LCR approach will lead to call failures and trouble tickets. Some customers will complain. The cost of chasing trouble tickets can be substantial as well as the re-routing necessary until the faulty route is fixed. Customer service staff to take the calls and service technician costs will increase. These costs can quickly eat up the lower rate per minute of the cheap route.
With Premium Quality, however, if you build things that don’t break, you don’t have any costs of fixing them later.
Typically only a small percentage of customers that experience poor quality or call failures will actually complain and take the time to put in trouble tickets. The silent majority will simply stop using your service and use an alternative. They will, however, complain internally to their management team about the poor experience.
Top-line revenue will then also decline over time, initially from customers not using your sub-quality voice service, but further once your organization develops a reputation for poor quality. The maxim “How you do one thing is how you do everything” describes that phenomenon. Customers will not renew, or would look more favourably on competitors offerings. One poor niche allows a competitor an advantage and an avenue to exploit.
This is why at AurorA we insist upon serving you with the highest quality, premium international voice termination. Our philosophy highlights that the penny pinching of using an LCR approach is not worth it, and over the long run higher revenues and lower costs accrue from providing superior quality service to your customers.
