Telephone Connections and Phones

Here are some pro's and con's for using various technologies.

The phone company (TELCO) has reliable and guaranteed service. Good rates can be gotten when you have high volume, often under 1 cent. A problem though is that you need to have an average call duration that is worthwhile for the TELCO, usually around 30 seconds. When you make a lot of short calls where an answering machine picks up, you typically terminate it within 20 seconds or less.

Dialing over VoIP still means that somewhere your call is bridged over to a TELCO, and you are back to where you started. You do not however have to pay for one or more T1's at $200-500/mth per T.

Depending on your VoIP carrier your rates might never hit $0.0035, that is 0.35 cents, as it can with really high volume calls to a TELCO. A VoIP carrier is buying from the TELCO in the first place and might not be able to compete at the same rates, but usually have zero or low monthly fee's and can operate on a month to month basis. One of the biggest advantages you have with VoIP is probably that it is very cheap to have a couple of hundred channels (lines). Plus it is very fast to order and implement. Usually the same day.

With VoIP you are calling over the Internet where there is really no guarantee that your call quality will always be good enough. There are certain backbone providers that understand the value of giving VoIP traffic priority service, one such example is Level 3.

Once on a Level 3 network your VoIP traffic will be cared for properly. This means you need to verify that your ISP can and will route your VoIP traffic over Level 3, and you need to ensure the same with you VoIP carrier, who will bridge to the TELCO. We can help you verify that they are directly connected to a Level 3 network.

You need to decide on two, three VoIP carriers, as backup.

Now you need to evaluate what type of phones your agents are going to use.

The thing to bare in mind is that average telemarketers are usually at the bottom of society, looking for example to earn money for their next fix. With that in mind it is usually not a good idea to buy expensive VoIP phones. If you however have educated people who have are professional, then it might be the right choice. A good brand is Polycom, known for their voice quality and good price. You will find their phones ranging from a bit over $100 to a few hundred.

You can use the sound card in the workstation together with a headset. The potential problem, which we have observed, is that the agents can stand up an walk away quickly and tear the connector loose in the computer, which will then need to be replaced.

Finally you can use plain analog phones which you can pick up with a headset for $20-30.

Anybody can replace a phone wire, phone and headset without any special training. While if a computer dies then that not only requires more know how, together with a higher pay, but also takes longer time. Analog phones however, require a device which translates the analog phone into something which can be connected to the dialer, so that has an additional expense of around $1,500 for every 24 seats. But they generally never break which makes it a single expense.