Local Number Portability [LNP]
Challenge
Least cost routing (LCR) is the process that allows carriers to financially optimize call termination by routing its customer’s interstate, intrastate and international calls. Optimizing this process improves the carrier’s margins significantly.
Our client, a fast-growing VOIP company, was initially performing the routing decisions by hard coding the routes into the system until it added several new suppliers for call termination. As the new suppliers were changing rates more frequently, it opened the possibility of saving money through dynamic call routing. In a preliminary analysis of the commercially available [COTS] products, it was clear that none of the products provided the least cost routing for international as well as interstate and intrastate calls. Moreover, none of the products offered dynamic call routing. Moreover, these products lacked automated supplier rate sheet transformation to update rates dynamically. This client required a custom solution that could upload supplier rate sheets automatically, analyze rate sheets, route calls to least-cost provider and consider call quality, network availability, etc.
Our Solution
Our professionals analyzed the business and technical challenges, designed an innovative solution, and developed and implemented a comprehensive Least Cost Routing system. This system has offline as well as real-time components. The offline component has a web-based GUI for users to interact with the system. This offline component allows LCR users to upload raw rate sheets. Upon user request, the system considers rates from all suppliers, LERG reference data, class, etc. to calculate cost-optimized routes.
The offline component also allows administrators to create dynamic rules to override least-cost routes. Additionally, the system allows creating groups of premium customers who have requested better call quality. The real-time component is integrated with the IP soft-switch to dynamically select the route when a call is initiated. It uses the cost-optimized routes prepared by the offline component as well as the dynamic rules, dial plans, customer groups, etc. to determine the best route. Moreover, the real-time components also integrate a dedicated server to determine call quality and route availability.
This system performed at a peak load of 300 calls per second.
- Faster revenue recognition
- Savings of 350K first year
- Reduced calls to call center by 10%. Providing to-the-minute information over IVR, reduced the calls
- Increased customer satisfaction by keeping them informed
- Reduced average LNP process cycle from 60 days to 14 days
- Artificial intelligence
- Predictive analysis presented appropriate information to the customer faster
- Tight integration
- Integration with back-end systems allowed automatic updates to appropriate systems and up-to-date information for the customers.
- Expedited carrier systems interface via web services.
- This included transferring data to generate orders with vendors, automatically checking for statuses, updating LNP database with accurate information as well as allowing LNP provisioning team to provide data clarifications
- IVR Integration
- System integrated with corporate IVR system to provide to-the-minute updates on LNP process to the customers calling into the call center
- .NET 2.5
- MySQL
- SOAP/XML
- VoiceXML