Calling all telecom carrier CFOs. Your time has come!

Feb 19

To say that the interconnect voice marketplace has been volatile these last 10 years is quite the understatement. The rapid pace of technological innovation, the imposition of regulatory forces (to add or remove), and the growing commoditization effect have profoundly transformed the marketplace. Today, it’s harder than ever to make a buck (or two, or three) in interconnect voice. In fact, the best way to do that is to not introduce new interconnect voice products. No, the best way to make more profit is to reduce your costs. Costs include: voice terminating costs, infrastructure costs, and last but not least, headcount reduction. This is the vernacular of the financial departments of carriers. CFOs, who lead these organizations, can finally begin to exert their influence in making the decision to reduce costs associated with interconnect voice.

CFOs have broad responsibilities, but their responsibilities always include ensuring that the company manages its expenses, generates sustainable cash flows, and pursues cost reduction whenever, and wherever, possible. In interconnect voice, the time has finally come where the market conditions are perfect for CFOs to take a more prominent role in, not only approving investments in new technologies, but actually participating, influencing, and even deciding on the technologies that can help them achieve their goals and fulfill their responsibilities.

Here are just a few examples:

A CFO wants to reduce voice termination costs to help improve buy/sell margins on their voice business.

The CFO doesn’t want to lose revenues but needs to increase margin. Today’s real-time routing engines available in the market can help do that easily. As an example, we tell our customers to expect a minimum of an 8% voice termination cost reduction in their first year. Now, we of course know they’ll realize more but we thought it might be silly to tout 20% savings! So, how does this happen? Well, a real-time routing and rating engine optimizes cost on a call-by-call basis. Each call can take advantage of the lowest cost suppliers that provide the necessary quality at that moment in time. Compare that to the legacy static routing many carriers still employ and it’s really easy to see how a carrier can become more termination cost efficient by migrating to a real-time platform that can take advantage of costs and network conditions on a call-by-call basis.

A CFO needs to reduce SG&A related to interconnect voice.

The CFO needs to “right size” the organization’s operating overhead compared to the revenue/margin mix that the interconnect voice business is generating and returning to the company. The way to do this without jeopardizing revenues or existing margins is through automated intelligence that the next gen of interconnect voice platforms offer today. The GCS Interconnect Command Platform (ICP) has hundreds, if not thousands, of features. Many of these were built to address the manually intensive tasks that carriers perform daily, weekly, and monthly in executing their responsibilities. This includes tasks such as: QoS, rate upload, CDR recon, alarm responses, credit management, fraud management, etc.