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By
Rick Mallon
IP-based voice services are seeing increasing success in residential markets and in the Web 2.0 world. Residential users love the lower prices, and individual business users like to take advantage of ubiquitous services like Skype that offer features beyond the typical voice offering, but neither of these market segments drives the sort of stringent requirements that a true commercial VoIP offering will demand. Whether serving large, national enterprises or small- to medium-sized regional businesses, carriers must address specific and challenging requirements that don’t exist in the consumer or Web 2.0 world. These range from more complex order capture processes; administrative self-help functions; complex telephony feature provisioning; and mass number ports to support for new CPE devices and SIP technology. Offerings that have succeeded in the residential market are not likely to translate directly to business markets and must be bolstered with the appropriate equipment and automated service management.
A Sensitive Customer Experience
Business customers typically cannot tolerate delays, errors, or failures when it comes to their voice services. Voice lines are a primary path to revenue and customer contacts. Businesses are extremely sensitive regarding anything that might jeopardize revenue, so building their confidence with a seamless transition to VoIP and a flawless administrative and end-user experience is necessary to win and also retain these high value customers.
Reliability and quality are always going to be concerns for a business that is looking to migrate to VoIP. Lower costs will attract them, but any perceived lack of quality can easily scare them away. Cutting expenses is not worth it if it means sales and customer interactions can suffer. Though typically reliability and quality issues around VoIP relate to quality of service and back up power, automated operational aspects are just as important in building the customer’s confidence once they are engaged.
The first interaction a business is going to have with its VoIP provider will involve the order capture process. This process is not typically very robust in the residential world because the orders only involve one or two lines. Carriers tend to get by with Excel spreadsheets and simple templates as a result. Business orders, however, almost always involve multiple lines – anywhere from five to more than 100, for example. Consider the sheer number of keystrokes involved in capturing an order for dozens of lines, most of which will have multiple features extending beyond voice mail and call forwarding. A manual process will not only be slow and cumbersome, but extremely error prone. If orders are not captured and processed
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Business customers typically cannot tolerate delays, errors, or failures when it comes to their voice services |
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correctly, it will lead to errors that delay the migration process, which can result in service disruptions. The fastest way to lose a newly won business customer’s confidence is to make a mess of the initial ordering process. This problem can be minimized with an automated solution that is designed to guide an agent through complex order capture, eliminates re-keying of common data, and performs basic integrity checks on every order. Orders must be subsequently tracked, managed, and reported upon with relevant operations support systems to ensure accurate provisioning, robust error handling, and instantiation of billing activities.
Part of this complex ordering process will involve mass number ports. Businesses need to keep their phone numbers consistent, so with dozens of lines will come dozens of number ports that must be executed flawlessly. Number porting is not simple. Stories abound in the industry about wrong numbers being ported, which in turn leave customers without service and no way to even contact their provider to fix the problem. Erroneous number ports will result in service disruptions at worst and a delayed and inelegant customer interaction at best. If this aspect of service fulfillment isn’t flawless, it will spoil the customer relationship from the start. Number porting processes can be automated to provide safety nets like integrity checks, to handle the kinds of asynchronous changes businesses tend to make to their orders in midstream and to free staff from managing every individual NPAC transaction.
Another factor in the set-up process is the directory listing. Many residential VoIP offerings do not support directory listings, and they have no reason to support yellow pages listings. The yellow pages still stand as a
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