5 Signs You’re Managing Too Many Voice Providers
Editor's Note: This piece has been updated since its original publication.
Many global companies have multiple voice carriers that provide their coverage around the world. This is typically not by design but rather due to previous voice purchases at the local level, geographic expansion, and mergers and acquisitions.
However, scaling your international voice service becomes more challenging with each new provider you work with. Each provider adds another layer to your tech stack and convoluted processes that can impede your business’s operations and hurt the bottom line.
It’s high stakes for your customer experience as well. 58% of contact center leaders say communication silos and system complexity negatively affect customer satisfaction.
However, global voice doesn’t have to be complex.
By partnering with a proven global voice expert, you can optimize your international reach, streamline your operations, and give your bottom line a boost. If the signs that you're managing too many providers are there, it's time to take control and unify your voice services.
Here are five signs you’re managing too many voice providers and what you can do to begin solving the issues.
1. You're spending too much time managing voice vendors
Managing multiple voice providers is a time-consuming and complex task that often prevents you from working towards your primary goals of streamlining operations and enhancing the caller experience. The key challenges in achieving optimal international voice service with several providers include:
Consolidating multiple points of contact (POCs)
Each voice provider requires interactions with various POCs for support and resolution of issues. Tracking and coordinating with these contacts consumes substantial time and effort, often leading to delays and inefficiencies.
Contract management overload
Every provider presents a distinct contract with its own terms and nuances. The responsibility of reviewing, understanding, and ensuring proper utilization of services for each contract is daunting and can easily become a full-time job. This complexity is heightened by the need to vigilantly check for erroneous charges and ensure compliance with contract terms.
Organizational challenges
The assortment of invoices in different languages and the requirement to collect specific documents for compliance purposes significantly complicates organizational tasks. Even though different providers might offer attractive pricing or phone number availability, the burden falls on your team to manage and navigate through an overwhelming amount of paperwork and requirements, making it difficult to maintain efficiency and ensure timely deployment of services.
Solution
Partner with a single, global voice provider to streamline processes, consolidate points of contact, simplify contract management, and reduce organizational challenges.
2. You’re struggling to predict and reduce costs
When working with multiple voice providers, keeping track of their diverse call rates, usage, and fees can be overwhelming. With bills arriving in various formats and lacking centralized storage and analysis, it becomes difficult to predict and optimize your costs effectively. Rates may change over time, making it even harder to stay on top of your expenses.
Moreover, attributing these costs to specific business units, geographical locations, or contact center operations is a challenge, obscuring your understanding of true business costs. Negotiating with individual carriers to address issues or explore optimization opportunities is also time-consuming and complex when dealing with multiple providers.
Consolidating your voice services also contributes to the wider discussion of optimizing your Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), but for now, we’re focusing more on the hard costs. Please reach out to our team if you would like to discuss how to best approach optimizing your TCO.
Solution
Work with an international voice expert who can help simplify your billing process, align costs with business units, consolidate tracking and monitoring of expenses into a single invoice, and enhance transparency in data and number usage. This will provide a clearer view of potential savings and areas for cost optimization.
3. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to resolve issues
Managing multiple voice providers often leads to reduced team efficiency, as it forces your team to operate in vendor-specific silos rather than focusing on overarching business needs. This approach fragments the management of SIP lines and phone numbers, removing the level of effectiveness required for effective voice management.
This siloed approach extends to your call flows and call quality. Problems tend to be vendor-specific and can’t easily be addressed in a unified manner. Consequently, your team is left waiting on vendor support to resolve issues, which can be a lengthy process.
Inefficiencies in these business processes can have a ripple effect, leading to:
- A more chaotic and challenging tech stack to manage
- Delays in resolving issues, negatively impacting customer experience
- Increased risk of employee burnout due to the added stress and workload
Solution
Move away from vendor-specific silos and partner with a provider that offers a unified approach to managing SIP lines, phone numbers, call flows, and call quality. This will enable more efficient issue resolution and reduce the risk of employee burnout.
4. You can’t easily configure, manage, and monitor call flows
Manually managing details like international phone numbers, SIP addresses, and other call flow destinations is inefficient and time-consuming for your employees. As your business expands, keeping tabs on ownership and ensuring that call flows align with your applications becomes an increasingly daunting task–especially true the more carriers you’re managing.
The complexity of managing call flows across multiple providers can lead to decreased efficiency and increased risk of errors, ultimately impacting your business operations and customer experience.
Solution
Automate the tracking and management of call flows, international phone numbers, SIP addresses, and other call flow destinations. This will improve efficiency, save time, and allow resources to be redirected towards critical optimizations.
5. You lack visibility and have inconsistent data
Gaining a clear and consistent view of your phone numbers’ performance, usage, traffic quality, and the integration of call data is essential in understanding the health of your voice channel.
However, this analysis becomes more complicated when dealing with multiple voice providers. Each provider has its unique features and approach for reporting, and not all will offer the same level of metrics and data quality. Some reports are basic, providing little insight into significant issues like poor call quality, non-functional phone numbers, or call traffic patterns.
Without the ability to proactively monitor your voice services through unified and high-quality data, staying ahead of potential problems becomes challenging. This limitation can impede the progress of your customer experience and operation goals.
Solution
Partner with a global voice leader that offers comprehensive analytics for performance evaluation, providing a clear and consistent view of phone number performance, usage, traffic quality, and call data integration. This will enable proactive monitoring and help you stay ahead of potential problems.
Streamline Your Voice Management Using a Truly Global Provider
Gaining greater control over your communications system empowers you to better manage your international voice service, ensuring excellent customer experiences. Partnering with a global voice leader who offers scalable phone numbers, knowledge in routing and configuration, and a strong commitment to voice quality standards is key to achieving your goals.
AVOXI stands out as a leading provider of premium international voice services for global businesses and contact centers. With its extensive world coverage in 150+ countries, reliable call quality, expertise in routing and SIP integrations, and comprehensive analytics for performance evaluation, AVOXI simplifies voice management. Whether through our one-stop-shop platform or your preferred ecosystem, optimizing your international voice services has never been easier.
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