From our work with many VoIP ITSPs (Internet Telephony Service Providers), we know how competitive the market for business-class and residential VoIP service is.
It is critical to get all four of the following elements right in order to succeed as a VoIP service company (besides great marketing and an effective sales force!). These points represent our formula for ITSP success, from our point of view as a consultancy, and these are the things we help our ITSP customers to implement, improve, and manage:
Value - The market is far too saturated and the downward cost pressure too intense to support players who engage in little more than resale and relabeling of carrier services.
Additionally, the telecommunications services market is characterised by the reality that many of the same vendors from whom you buy transport, minutes and switching are in direct competition with you, often retailing the same services straight to your users.
In the US, cable television companies are in the voice arena as well, aggressively converting customers from the telco world with commoditised voice offerings.
To succeed, you have to provide compelling and innovative value-added services that give your users a real reason to choose you over ample competition. This means a proposition consisting of business-level differentiators that really matter.
Our knowledge of the capabilities of VoIP applications can help you keep - and monetise - your edge. We specialise in the deployment of low-cost, high-margin value-added services such as fax-to-email, interactive voice response, and automatic provisioning to your portfolio to increase your average revenue per user.
Engineering - Hardly exists a VoIP provider today that does not fondly affix the adjective "carrier-class" to their array of services. But are they carrier-class, or are they the weakest link in the call path, and therefore, the value chain?
Delivering reliability that makes VoIP service a comparable value to traditional Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) lines is a unique challenge from a technical and marketing perspective. The PSTN has been around for a long time and that is the standard from which users are proceeding.
You know how critical the voice service - and increasingly, video - is to the flow of business. There is no substitute for scalable, redundant architecture and featureful systems.
Cost structure - The margins in the VoIP service space are too thin for you to afford passing up the best deals possible for your inputs. Let us help you find the best avenues for your origination, termination and interconnection. We can put our engineering to work for you to analyse your call blend and clarify your eligibility for special volume deals, deliver least cost routing, and limit your exposure to money-losing routes and service abuse.
Your success is our success; we want to see your gross margins increase and your cash flow position improve!
Service - Your end-users acquired their conception of the voice business from a landscape teeming with ineffectual, monopolistic bureaucracy, inefficiency and inconvenience. It is an essential staple of the mass-cultural canon to "hate the phone company," and that is the obstacle of perception you have to best by delivering a refreshing breath of turn-key simplicity.
We can help you achieve that by identifying and implementing business process optimisations to deal with common administrative and technical bottlenecks related to provisioning, number portability, and other management tasks. Your users will come away happier and your staff more free to focus on innovation and improvement of your business, rather than putting out fires day after day.