How to reduce toll-free costs while increasing redundancy in your contact center

When cost savings matter more than ever (like now), migrating your toll-free contact center traffic to a provider that can reduce your operating costs isn’t just a good move—it’s a necessary one. You need redundancy and resiliency to mitigate risk, and you need it at value. 

Bandwidth does that, and this blog post spells out how. 

First things first. It’s important to know that: 

• Bandwidth is one of the nation’s largest toll-free carriers.
• We have our own Feature Group D Network. 
• We’re a RespOrg (Responsible Organization aka managing body).
• And we have a robust dashboard and suite of APIs that support large orders and rapid provisioning of toll-free numbers. 

But the unique architecture of our network is the real story here. We often call it our ‘5x redundant network’, and it saves our customers a lot of money. 

How improving toll-free redundancy directly impacts operating costs and revenue

Redundancy has a direct impact on your bottom-line. When toll-free calls aren’t completed, customers can’t get what they need. They get frustrated, and your opportunities for revenue, brand trust, and reputation suffer. 

Contact center owners still remember (with horror) the havoc that ensued when a major carrier’s network went down nearly four years ago. It affected the entire U.S. and prevented all toll-free calls from completing. While nationwide outages like that are rare, localized outages are not uncommon. And owners of toll-free numbers can’t work around outages when they’re single-threaded (meaning you just have one carrier that lacks redundancy). If they go down in a local market, you go down in that market. 

That’s why many companies choose to work with several toll-free providers—so that when an outage happens, they have options. It’s a smart business decision, actually. But it’s also complicated to manage, drives up pricing and makes billing messy, and requires you to build and maintain complex routing engines on your own. 

A 5x redundant network for quality and cost savings

Bandwidth has created a multi-carrier redundant Toll-Free solution that helps avoid a single point of failover. How? As a RespOrg, we leverage our own Feature Group D Network alongside direct peering relationships with four other Tier 1 carriers (like AT&T, CenturyLink, and Verizon). That means we provide 5x the redundancy that any single toll-free provider can offer. Partnership is in our DNA, and we practice it in every area of our business, even the way we work with other carriers.

Bandwidth’s 5x redundant network means that you don’t have to manually build and maintain those complex routing engines to get the safety of multi-vendor redundancy. We do it for you. Our 24/7 Network Operations Team actively scans traffic, detects anomalies, and makes critical adjustments to your routing templates in real time. So that your customers (and your revenue) can get through.

This saves you money in two ways.

First, by reducing the operating costs of managing all your routing templates yourself. And second, it opens up more efficient pricing options because you can safely send more of your traffic through a redundant provider. You benefit from the economies of scale. More volume = more pricing options. Bandwidth’s innovative Toll-Free solution means you can safely send a greater percentage of your toll-free traffic to Bandwidth, get equivalent redundancy as when you manage multiple vendors (possibly more), and reap the cost benefits. 

It’s less risk for less cost. The best of win-wins, and exactly what inspired us to build out our own Toll-free Network.