8XX Traffic: A Hidden Margin Gem

In today’s highly commoditized voice services marketplace, it can often be challenging to find new areas of revenue or margin contribution, particularly in the domain of interconnect/wholesale voice.

 But one area continues to demonstrate an innate ability to generate positive revenue and margin contributions (Off-Net Toll-Free voice calls).

 Most of us know toll-free or, as it’s technically defined, “Called Party Pays”.  Companies big and small use toll-free numbers to improve customer support, branding, and specialized marketing campaigns.   

 In the world of toll-free, it’s called party pays which, to be clear, means the person who owns the toll-free number pays the per minute rate/per call fee imposed by the voice service providers. This is different than the traditional way we think of voice services where it’s “Calling Party Pays” meaning, the person/party dialing the phone number is responsible for paying the charges associated with the call.

 This reverse scenario in the world of toll-free creates interesting revenue/margin contributing opportunities.   Now, the network originating the call is going to be paid by the carrier that owns the toll-free number where the call will be terminated.  This “inter-carrier” compensation model has been around for a long time and carriers like how it works.  For allowing toll-free calls to happen on their network and handing it off to another carrier, they get paid.  No customer service required, less burdens on accounting and collections, it’s all “gravy” to the carrier. But, there’s even more gravy to extract, if the originating carrier is willing to put a little bit extra work into it.  

 Today, most carriers off-load toll-free calls that originate on their network that they don’t own.  They push these call through an “aggregator”.  The aggregator, in turn, distributes the toll-free calls to the appropriate party for completion. Further, the aggregator compensates the originating carrier, making the process clean, simple, and predictable.

 But as we said, there’s more gravy to extract if the carrier is willing to put in some effort.  It should come as no surprise that the aggregators incentive is to pay the originating network carrier as little as possible and keep as much of the call charges to themselves.  And this is where the right tools and tech can be used by the originating network carrier to extract more revenue and margin for that toll-free call.

 GCS, has recently partnered with SOMOS.  SOMOS is the 3rd party administrator for the toll-free directory in the U.S (TFN Registry).  Their product, called “RouteLink” allows GCS to access the TFN registry information in real-time.  Having this information available for each and every toll-free call allows the GCS Dynamic Routing Engine within the GCS ICP platform to know which carrier or RespOrg is the terminating network for the toll-free number

 Now, GCS ICP can allow our customers to send these off-net toll-free calls directly to the number owner and receive compensation directly thereby cutting out the “middleman aggregator”.   

 This is how to extract more value.  This is why toll-free traffic is a hidden gem in a carrier’s network.

 To learn more about the GCS & SOMOS partnership or about any of the GCS ICP capabilities contact our sales and product teams.