Jean-Michel Hiver wrote:
"ALMOST does not count except in horse shoes and hand grenades."
Neither of which would I ever consider basing 12,000 call a day
5million minute/mo, multi-million dollar call center on.
That's 13.8 minutes per call. Pretty good going for a call center!
It's probably tech support, I suspect mass phone marketing as a much
lower ACD than this =)
Yes, we do all inbound at the moment from direct response marketing, so
they are inbound sales calls from interested customers.
We are soon going to offering a gift to our customers. A 500 minute/mo
calling card which will skyrocket our minute usage and DS3 trunks. I
really don't want this traffic on the DS3 feeding the call center and
since it is a calling card, it costs twice (cost and channel) as much to
terminate the call (trunk to trunk).
Is there anyone out there that offers hosted calling card apps with an
API to tie into our business logic and databases? The real motivation
in seeking VoIP alternatives is the calling card service but if the
savings prove significant all other things being equal, then the call
center would logically follow.
Lets talk dollars and cents. Quantify the cost part of "IP
connections can be made much more fault tolerant than TDM connections
at a much lower cost." I understand the fault tolerance (but not so
much in your no peering scenario). Cost of what? The cost of
redundancy? Are you including the costs of lost revenue, sales, an
hour of downtime costing $25k? Lets talk numbers since we both
understand how the public internet works (or doesn't for realtime
apps). Neither my voice DS3 nor my multilink 3xT1s have ever gone
down and have always provided PERFECT voice quality.
Some gateways such as Quintum have the ability to automatically
failover PSTN when speech quality becomes unacceptable. That might be
what you're looking for... you'd still get some substantial savings by
doing LCR & using multiple VoIP providers (ibasis, vsnl, teleglobe...)
AND you would still get decent speech quality at all times.
Quintum makes AWESOME boxes. We use several of the TenorAX models in
our setup for station side stuff. I am glad you mentioned this since I
knew the feature sets of their other products but didn't put together
the two as an option until you brought it up. This may very well be the
best avenue to explore.
Mind you, with this kind of volume, you might be able to negotiate
pretty good deals over TDM anyways... it's what the VoIP players do:
collect traffic to try and build volume so they can get better deals.
Since you already have the volume (okay, 5MM is tiny in the grand
scheme of things, but still pretty good going), and don't have a
multi-site setup, VoIP might be lots of migration work and get you
little in return.
We have a pretty decent rate right now, I am just fishing and exploring
other options but I do not really see the savings vs risk realized.
Fractions of pennies add up quickly on this scale but potential lost
revenue adds up quicker. VoIP migration would free up a great deal of
servers for other tasks and be fairly trivial since we are running a
heavily modified version of Asterisk.
And if it's a multimillion dollar operation, it's not like you can toy
around with it too much either...
I definitely agree with that but with the holy grail of Asterisk, some
toying is possible while mitigating the risks if done correctly.
Cheers,
Jean-Michel.
Thanks,
Steve Totaro
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