A priority for any new call center installation, once calls are being successfully dialed, is making those calls at the lowest cost. Trunk usage charges are a very visible number, and a tempting target for savings. It is vital that call center software offer a means of ensuring that calls get dialed in an economical manner. An Asterisk Cloud-based call center should be no different.
Least Cost Routing solutions can be very complex, and it’s easy to get lost in the technology. However, for most call centers, the needs are very simple. Trunk providers don’t often expose clients to the details of their own costs, and usually simplify the price sheet to avoid confusion. Therefore, the opportunities for lowering costs are usually quite obvious. The most common cases encountered are:
- Local calls (whether local means a city, state, calling code or country) are cheaper with a local provider
- Non-local calls are cheaper with a larger carrier who does not offer lower-cost local dials
- Mobile calls may be cheaper with one provider versus landline calls
- Out of jurisdiction (out of country, overseas) calls are cheaper with another carrier
It’s often the case that out-of-country or overseas dials are not done at all, or are done infrequently enough that shopping around for another provider for these calls isn’t worthwhile.
In these cases, it’s usually straightforward to determine phone number patterns that identify a phone number as belonging to one of the above groups versus another. Asterisk itself includes pattern-matching, if you’re willing to get your hands dirty and edit your config files manually. Q-Suite 5 has long offered the ability to set trunk routing rules; patterns that identify a number as being ideally routed over one trunk or another. It is certainly possible to say that a certain dialing campaign or extension should use a specific trunk for all calls. When there is a large disparity in costs and a number of leads that should be handled differently, however, having the ability to set up least cost routing via the admin interface can be very helpful to the bottom line.