When you are shopping around for most services, you know which features you are looking for. With enterprise internet service, you want a good Service Level Agreement and high bandwidth. With a security service, you want active monitoring and rapid response.
What do you look for, though, when shopping for telephony services, especially international VoIP services? You can’t simply compare price per minute and stop there, so what are the features you should be looking for?
High-Quality Call Termination
A phone call, whether VoIP or over the PSTN, isn’t handled entirely by a single provider. It is routed between providers from the originating point to the called party in a process referred to as call termination.
The fact of life is that not all providers are created equal, especially in the case of VoIP. You need to look for a provider with strong presence and relationships in countries where your business is active in order to ensure high line quality, rather than a provider who will look for the lowest price with no regard to call termination quality.
Active Monitoring
Most enterprise internet packages are actively managed, meaning the provider keeps an eye on the performance of the connection to ensure they are delivering the appropriate level of service. When you are willing to pay a premium for monitoring for the service which enables your VoIP communication, you can’t afford to expect less from the VoIP service.
A good VoIP provider will actively monitor routes and partners and will be able to change call termination routes in the event of any issues or quality loss. If your business relies on communication, you can’t afford to rely on the ‘best effort’ delivery of a poor VoIP provider.
International Presence
When you are looking for a good international VoIP provider, you need to ensure they have an international presence, both for pricing and call termination quality reasons.
With pricing, a provider with presence in a country will be able to provide local DIDs, allowing customers and clients to communicate directly with your business while keeping costs down, enabling two-way communication.
Secondly, presence in a nation or region can mean strong relationships and knowledge of local carriers as well as the ability to revert to the PSTN closer to the call endpoint, keeping costs to a minimum and ensuring that the call termination is handled by only the best local providers.
Anti-Fraud Measures
Companies in all industries suffer losses to fraud and, sadly, VoIP services are no different. In order to ensure that your costs are limited to those that you legitimately incur, you need to be able to rely on your VoIP service provider to only provide service to legitimate users.
A good VoIP provider will actively monitor call usage in a way similar to how a credit card company monitors activity in order to rapidly identify high-cost ‘out of character’ usage. This will help to prevent fraudulent activity. Ideally, a customer will never even need to be aware of VoIP fraud.
