A new decade, the third one of this century. How do we make it better than the last one?

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2020. Just writing that seems crazy. We are at the start of the third decade of the 21st Century. What will this decade be like? What new innovations will become adopted on a wide scale (Drone delivery, electric cars, self-driving cars, Space travel)? I certainly don’t know, but in our little world of interconnect voice, we here at GCS, have some ideas.

The interconnect voice industry will continue to accelerate its evolution and automation (i.e. intelligent automation) will be core to this evolution. The industry will continue to remain relevant just with significantly fewer people engaged. How big of a workforce reduction do we think will happen by 2029? We think the number of people working in interconnect voice directly will shrink by at least 50% by the end of this decade! The drivers of this will be automation, by the innovators and solution providers, and the demands of cost reduction that carriers will seek. Additionally, attrition through retiring of the current generation of industry reps and the reduction of new applicants interested in joining the field. Software engineers will develop highly automated tool sets that will incorporate artificial intelligence. Also, the cycle of consolidation will continue which will invariably lead to the rise of new entrants.

All of this means interconnect voice will rely more and more on sophisticated back-office systems to allow them to respond to the market dynamics. Systems that can scale, react in real-time, and provide real meaningful interpretation of data related to, not only network and business performance, but new metrics. In particular, GCS has been exploring the importance of Network Yield and the way it can inform and guide business performance. For the past two years, GCS has been tracking and studying network yield across the traffic it manages.

Here’s what we found:

In the international traffic section of the marketplace, the average network yield in terms of minutes (minutes per attempt and minutes per complete) is:

Avg completes per attempt: 28.6%
Minutes per attempt: 1.06
Minutes per completed call: 3.73

This means for every call that can be completed, our international carrier customers are generating 3.73 minutes in billable activity. Using the industry average of $0.034 per min ARPM, that equates to $11.465M that a carrier generates using the existing industry averages for network yield.

But what if we could increase that by 10% or more?

In our view, carriers that focus on improving network yield are going to be the winners. The commoditization of interconnect voice is now complete, and now the winners and losers will fight over network yield.

How do you improve network yield?

You get smart about the attempts on your network. Selecting quality attempts over less quality attempts. Partnering with good originators AND good terminators.

Yes, 2020 is here and we are embarking on an uncertain decade, but if we focus on the right things maybe this will be the best decade for interconnect voice since the 1996 Telecommunications Act and the introduction of VoIP by Vocaltec happened at the end of the last Century!