VoIP adoption is growing worldwide, with some telecoms providers even having end-of-life dates for their packet switching telephone networks planned within the next decade.
With this growing adoption, there is increasing competition between providers, making service quality more important than before. In the VoIP world, call termination quality is king when it comes to sales and customer retention.
Here are three tips that can help VoIP providers attract and retain customers and give potential VoIP adopters an idea of what to look for to find a high-quality VoIP provider.
Aim for High-Quality Partnerships
Fundamentally, a VoIP provider is not necessarily providing the voice termination for any given call, especially when you look at international VoIP. Call quality will, however, reflect on the provider, even if a fault has nothing to do with the network they manage.
Providers need to develop partnerships with termination providers worldwide who share their quality targets in order to ensure a high level of service. Another option would be to work with a well-established wholesaler such as idtexpress, who already has substantial presence and partnerships worldwide.
Use Multiple Paths
Communication is business-critical to almost every industry, which means VoIP providers need to provide substantial resiliency to maintain their client base.
This means hardware needs to be redundant, with failovers in place, and there also need to be multiple traffic paths mapped and monitored to ensure that an issue in a single network node can’t bring down your network.
Monitor and Maintain Your Network
Going hand in hand with redundancy, all the preparedness in the world will not help you keep customers if you don’t detect faults.
With enterprises expecting as close to 100 per cent uptime as can be reasonably offered, providers can’t afford to sit and wait for a customer to tell them something is wrong. Instead, they need to proactively monitor and manage customer connections, looking for faults and using redundant equipment and pathways in order to mitigate negative customer experiences rather than viewing them as a last resort.
Increased VoIP adoption brings incredible opportunities for providers, but it also increases competition. Keeping customers and growing your business isn’t rocket science; you just have to aim to notice problems before your customers do, and in an ideal world, fix them just as quickly.