October 1999

BY LIOR HARAMATY

When it comes right down to it, Internet telephony is like any other business. The trick is to get customers and keep them happy. In the increasingly competitive service provider arena, this goal is becoming more and more elusive. How can service providers maintain customer loyalty in an age where competition is just a mouse click away? Let’s take a look at how IP telephony gives service providers a leg up by maximizing a customer’s communications capabilities.

Internet telephony enables service providers to offer their customers a bevy of communications plans, and these services run the gamut from the traditional to futuristic. By investing in IP telephony gateways and gatekeepers, and participating in settlement and clearinghouse services, service providers today can establish a global presence that allows customers to pick and choose the calling plans that work best for them. Following are some of these calling services:

Direct Dialing. Direct dialing is the most familiar communications service. Let’s face it, dialing from a regular phone to another regular phone is about as basic as you get. By offering direct dialing, service providers can cast their nets as wide as possible, to attract customers regardless of Internet awareness or technical savvy.

Prepaid Calling Cards. Calling cards are standard wallet material these days. They’re easy for customers to use, and work on any public or private telephone. Prepaid calling cards are available at many points of sale, and carry different values and calling rates. The cards can target specific countries and destinations, and can be distributed in locations that are known for generating high volumes of calls to targeted destination countries. The cost of marketing such a service is rather low. Most of the cost is in printing the cards and creating the relationships and agreements with the points of sale. Having an easy-to-use mechanism to “recharge” prepaid calling cards can be very beneficial and improve repeat business from the same customers.

PC-to-Phone. Unlike the traditional telephone network, PC-to-phone calling supports services that allow customers to make low-cost calls from their PCs to traditional telephones. This service should be targeted to Internet savvy customers who are used to communicating from their PCs. PC-to-phone calls allow customers already online, communicating by e-mail, to easily integrate voice communications activity. All they have to do is toggle over to an Internet telephony application to place low-cost calls to a regular phone anywhere in the world. With a PC-to-phone service, leveraging the Internet for marketing is the way to go. The targets are Internet users — people who can be approached through the Internet and pinpointed through targeted advertising. More and more, service providers are adopting PC-to-phone services as Internet usage continues to soar and becomes an essential part of family and business communications.

Web-to-Phone. IP telephony allows business customers to accept calls from surfers at their Web sites. This new and exciting application fulfills one of the most important missing links in the development of e-commerce — the introduction of customer care into online shopping. Service providers can now lure customers by offering a solution that lets surfers at the Web site call the customers’ business phones. No more lost business because a surfer couldn’t navigate a Web site to find an answer, or, simply needed to hear a human voice before making a purchase. For more information on Web-to-phone applications, refer to my September column, VoIP: Part III — Web-Enabled Call Centers, The Killer Application.

SERVICES KEEP CUSTOMERS HAPPY
Clearly, Internet telephony can support a more comprehensive communications solution for the growing wired base of customers. These customers need not only traditional services such as direct dialing, but professional services that can help them stay on the leading edge of the communications field to support their businesses, provide greater convenience, and save money. IP telephony allows service providers to help their customers master these new communications solutions. And these services can prove very effective in strengthening customer loyalty.

The need to keep your customers happy is not news, but with the Internet at your disposal, customer satisfaction can be achieved for a lower cost and faster response time worldwide. Customers can go online to sign up for service, or for account information. By automating as many services as possible — account balance, payments, call logs, rates, technical support, FAQs, new services, and other information — service providers can improve customer interaction by providing instant answers.

Finally, the Web provides a solution for cost-effectively promoting a service provider business.

Foremost, service providers can promote their businesses at other businesses’ Web sites or portals. They can also display their logos on PC-to-phone applications, or Web-to-phone icons. IP telephony clearly offers a way of differentiating a business in the competitive communications arena, while allowing for the building of a network that is developing to support the solutions of the future. c

Lior Haramaty is a co-founder of VocalTec Communications and belongs to the original group that started the VoIP industry. Haramaty has dealt with passing audio over data networks since the late 80s. VocalTec started shipping VoIP products in the early 90s. Haramaty has a multidisciplinary background in the business, technology and marketing fields, is a co-inventor on VoIP patents, and has initiated and spear-headed standards activities in the industry. The goal of this column is to clearly explain issues related to voice (and other media) over Internet Protocol (VoIP) to anyone, including the “acronym-impaired” person. Requests for future column subjects are welcomed. Please write to [email protected].