Evaluating Your Businesss Toll-Free Needs

Evaluating Your Business’s Toll-Free Needs

Every business has its own, particular toll-free requirements, aspirations, and dreams. Your business must have certain features; other features would be nice, as long as they don’t break the bank; and finally there are the features that you would love to have but may only exist in your dreams. The best way to ensure that you get everything you want is to list all of your preferences
(and rank them accordingly) before you make the first call to your carrier. Or at least find out if what you want is available. The good news is that all carriers provide the same basic toll-free features. Not sure what you want, or even what’s available? Read the following sections, which break down features based on business size and profile.

Small to midsize businesses

Business Profile: Companies in this category have 15 or fewer employees and fewer than 10 phone lines in the office. The main function of the business isn’t telecom related and the level of service they provide is basic.

Recommendations: Regular, plain-vanilla toll-free service with no features may be all you need. You probably want your toll-free number to roll over to a group of lines set up by your local carrier so that when two people call in, the second person doesn’t get a busy signal.

 Tip  If you have a service business, you may need to make sure that the phones are answered after hours. You can get something called Time-of-Day routing. This service sends calls to voicemail after you close shop at night. If your existing phone system doesn’t pick up calls after you close your shop, you can have your long-distance carrier send your toll-free calls to a different location, based on the time of day and day of week. What this means is that you can set up the toll-free number from 8:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m., Monday through Friday to ring into your office, but at 5:01 p.m. you may want it to be pointed to an after-hours answering service, or to the cellphone of a designated on-call employee. You need to tell the carrier where to repoint calls from 5:01 p.m. to 7:59 a.m. every morning during the week and all day on the weekends. You also need to confirm your company’s holiday schedule with your carrier so that you are all in agreement when your office will be closed. You may work a half-day on Christmas Eve, or the factory may shut down between Christmas and New Years: In either case, you need to cover all of your standard days off to make sure you are all on the same sheet of music. Of course, your phone system or local carrier may already cover this service, so make sure you know what features you already have before opting for more.

Small to midsize service businesses with several locations

Business Profile: Companies in this category provide a very high level of service within an industry that demands quick response times. These businesses have fewer than 20 employees per location. Cab companies, tow truck services, and plumbing/electrical repair companies are businesses that you might expect to find in this category.

Recommendations: Geographic routing (sometimes called just geo routing) is a great feature for small service-oriented businesses with multiple locations because it enables you to list a single toll-free number for all of your customers even though calls are routed to various office locations, depending on where your customer is calling from. For example, if you have a regional towing company with two locations in the Northwest and someone calls you from Sutherlin, Oregon, the call is routed to your office in Medford, Oregon. If someone else dials the exact same toll-free number from Seattle, Washington, the call is routed to your Tacoma, Washington, office. Geographic routing uses technology to project the same sense of continuity you get from a large business while also offering the personalized customer care you expect from a smaller company.

 Tip  Depending on your business, you may set up geographic routing so that anyone who calls from a state in the eastern time zone rings to your Florida office. If someone calls the same toll-free number in the central time zone states, the call can be sent to your Colorado office, while calls in the pacific time zone ring to your Oregon location.

In addition to the geographic routing, you may also want Time-of-Day routing (see the previous section, “Small to midsize businesses”) so that calls can roll over to the cellphones or pagers of your after-hours staff.

Telecom-centered businesses

Business Profile: Companies that fall into this category sell telecom products or services (calling cards, telemarketing services, and so on) as their primary or secondary product. If you find yourself ordering toll-free numbers in quantities of 100 at a time, or if your company’s phone bill is 50 percent or more of your operating expense, your business falls into this group.

Typically, telecom-centered companies use a large quantity of toll-free numbers with basic features, although they may have a bunch of toll-free numbers with advanced features. The bottom line with these companies is that their toll-free numbers are their lifeblood, and without them they do not make any money. These companies generally have a complex phone switch that works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year processing and tracking all calls. This consistency of service prevents any need for Time-of-Day or geographic routing, because telecom companies always want calls to come to one place — the switch. Your main concerns if you work in this type of business are pay phone surcharges and redundancy.

Understanding the origins of pay phone surcharges

Toll-free numbers are free for callers to use, but 20 years ago they were even more free. If you dialed a toll-free number from a pay phone, the call completed and the PSP didn’t receive or expect any money for the call. PSPs didn’t see a need to add the charge because cellphones were not common, and enough people were dropping 25 cents into pay phones that the PSPs were happy and rich. In the last 20 years, though, everything has changed and now fewer calls are made from pay phones. A larger percentage of those calls are made to toll-free numbers than to regular numbers. The PSPs realized this and lobbied Congress for a surcharge so they can stay in business. The fee started out as 23 cents, grew to 35 cents, and is now 55 cents per call.

 Remember  If telecom is your business, you can understand why making your toll-free numbers work for you is essential. You can also understand why I can’t give you all the information on this massive topic in one place. The following sections offer basic recommendations and tell you generally what you need to do to protect your business from catastrophic charges and network failures.

Recommendation 1: Factor in pay phone surcharges

Pay phone surcharges are federally mandated fees of 55 cents per call. The surcharges are assessed by pay phone owners (also called a pay phone service providers or PSPs) to the recipients of all toll-free calls made from pay phones.

Your company may need pay phone blocking if your hardware can’t detect the information embedded in each call that identifies where it originated. If your business sells calling cards and you charge customers ten cents a minute to use one of your calling cards, that’s one thing. But if a customer makes a two-minute call from a pay phone with a calling card, your business loses money — 35 cents, to be precise. That’s not including the per-minute rate your carrier charges you for the call, or your overhead in printing, marketing, and customer service. In this situation, you have two possible solutions:

• Get the infodigits. You need to upgrade your phone system with a piece of hardware that can detect infodigits embedded in the call so that you can pass that 55-cent surcharge on to the caller. When choosing this route, remember to add some fine print on your calling cards alerting your customers to the additional fee from pay phones.

• Block toll-free calls from pay phones. You can tell your long-distance carrier to block access to your toll-free numbers from all pay phones. This option eliminates the surcharge problem entirely, but it also limits customer access to your service.

   Tip  If most of your customers don’t use pay phones, paying an additional fee to block toll-free pay phone calls may be overkill. On the other hand, if most of your customers do call from pay phones, not using this option could kill your company. Take a look at your customer base and determine what you need to do.

 Technical Stuff  The pay phone indicator that is embedded in each call is referred to in the industry as the ANI II (pronounced ann-EE-eye-eye) or ANI Infodigits. ANI Infodigits are two-digit numbers that identify the origin of a call, be it a pay phone, jail, or operator assisted. Table 5-1 lists a few ANI IIs, as well as their descriptions. The ANI Infodigits are present in the overhead of every call, but only visible to you when using a dedicated circuit. Even then you will need the appropriate hardware with the correct protocol to identify and process the calls accordingly.

Table 5-1: ANI Infodigits

ANI II	Description of Code
00	Calls from plain old telephone service (POTS) lines are non-coin calls and require no special treatment.
06	Calls from hotels or motels served by PBX telephone systems. Receive detailed billing information, including the calling party’s room number.
07	Special operator handling required.
23	Calls originated from a pay phone.
27	Calls originated from a pay phone where the pay phone provider does not supply an originating ANI.
29	Prison/Inmate Service. The ANI II digit pair 29 is used to designate lines within a confinement or detention facility that are intended for inmate/detainee use and require outward call screening and restriction. Federal prisons, state prisons, local prisons, juvenile facilities, immigration and naturalization detention facilities all fall into this category.

The information in Table 5-1 is only available to your phone system if you have the following:

• A dedicated circuit from a carrier’s hardware that provides ANI Infodigits.

• A dedicated circuit using either ISDN or Feature Group D protocol.

Please check out Chapter 8 if you want more information about these protocols and how they work.

 Remember  If you provide a service to the PSPs, such as operator service, you may be able to qualify for a pay phone waiver to exempt you from paying the surcharge. It doesn’t make any sense for a PSP to contract with your business and then charge you 55 cents per call. You’ll just turn around and charge that amount back to the PSP to cover your costs, and the employees in your accounts payable and accounts receivable departments will go on strike. Your carrier may make you sign a legal statement to protect itself from recriminations, but as long as your business has a contract with the PSPs authorizing that the fee is waived, you’re in a good place.

Recommendation 2: Add redundancy

If toll-free numbers are the lifeblood of your business, you have them coming in on a dedicated circuit from your carrier so that you can maximize your profit (see Chapter 9), but what happens if your carrier has an outage and your circuit fails? If you don’t have a solid disaster recovery plan, your business could be shut down for hours or days while network technicians repair the issue.

 Tip  The best way to protect yourself against an outage is to have dedicated circuits from two different carriers, and have complete ownership (RespOrg) of your toll-free numbers. With this kind of power, you can redirect your toll-free numbers to your second carrier in a matter of minutes if lines from the first carrier fail. How you accomplish this is by becoming your own RespOrg.

Becoming your own RespOrg

If your business relies on toll-free numbers, you own hundreds of them, and you have dedicated circuits with more that one carrier, you should probably go one final step and make your company a RespOrg. Any company can become a recognized RespOrg and gain access to the national SMS database. This decision does require a bit of financial commitment, but it’s worth it if toll-free numbers are a main part of your business.

To make your business a RespOrg, you must pay the $4,000 initial fee and pay for (and attend) mandatory training. After you pay the fees and complete the training, you get your very own RespOrg ID code, just like every other carrier, and you’re off and running. You also have to pay a monthly fee for each toll-free number you have, as well as a fee whenever you touch a toll-free number to activate, cancel, migrate, or release it. If you’re interested in making your business into a RespOrg, please check out the 800 Service Management System (www.sms800.com) for all the details, fees, and procedures.

 Tip  If all this expense and training is a bit over your head, you can have almost all the benefits of a direct RespOrg relationship at a fraction of the cost by hiring a third-party RespOrg company. Third-party organizations have gone through the SMS training and are full-fledged RespOrgs that create a subaccount for your business. You still have your very own RespOrg ID code, but you do not have to go through any training because you don’t have direct access to the national SMS database. Whenever you want to activate a toll-free number, simply contact the third-party RespOrg company and everything is taken care of for you. Using a third-party RespOrg is a great idea for people who make fewer than 2,500 additions, changes, or deletions per month to their toll-free numbers. If you’re looking to go this route for your toll-free numbers, you can check out my favorite third-party RespOrg company, ATL Telecom Services (www.atlc.com).

Here are some of the benefits of becoming your own RespOrg:

• You have direct access into the national SMS database 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You don’t have to wait for a change order to move through the order system in your carrier. Rather than a 1-to-7-day time frame to make changes to your toll-free numbers, you can make changes in about 15 minutes.

• You can use multiple long-distance carriers for all of your toll-free traffic. All long-distance carriers are limited to routing calls over their own individual networks. Qwest won’t send calls over AT&T lines for you, and MCI won’t send calls to Sprint for you. Billing would be impossible, and no carrier wants to be responsible for troubleshooting calls that fail over another carrier’s network. If you want to exploit the benefits of more than one carrier, your business must do it without the carriers’ help.

  As your own RespOrg, you can choose which areas in the U.S. you want to route over which carrier. If you have dedicated circuits with both Sprint and MCI, and Sprint has a better rate for calls from Texas, you can point all calls from Texas over your Sprint circuit. At the same time, you can have all the calls from California route over the MCI circuit if MCI offers the best rates.

• You can use a secondary carrier for redundancy. If lightning strikes the switch for your long-distance carrier and turns it into a molten block of silicon and steel, that carrier is essentially worthless for a period of days or weeks when it comes to toll-free coverage from the affected area. If you have two long-distance carriers and both of them have your numbers set up to route into you, this catastrophe is a 15-minute inconvenience. All you need to do is go into the SMS database and update it so that all your toll-free traffic is routed through your other carrier.

• Your numbers cannot be held hostage. When you move your toll-free numbers from one carrier to another, your old carrier can reject your request to release them if you’re in the middle of a billing dispute or because you are under contract. The carrier may hold onto your toll-free numbers and even take them out of service to force you to pay your bill. It sounds a lot like extortion, but these stipulations are generally written into any contract you sign for service. If your business is also a RespOrg, you own your numbers and control the carrier you send the traffic to. If you have service with both MCI and Sprint, and MCI shuts down your numbers down in the MCI network for any reason, you simply update the SMS database and send all the traffic to Sprint. In 15 minutes or so your toll-free numbers are back up and MCI can’t use your toll-free numbers as a pawn against your business.

Large businesses with heavy usage and multiple locations

Business Profile: Companies with over 100 employees that spend more than $5,000 per month on toll-free phone service have a heightened need for redundancy, service, and disaster recovery. These companies have at least one dedicated circuit, and possibly several per location. Each regional office may have multiple customer service and sales support departments at various locations working in tandem.

Recommendation 1: Divide your calls in a percentage allocation

A percentage allocation enables you to split up where toll-free calls are sent based on a set percentage. If you have two offices that can take incoming phone orders, but one is twice as large as the other, you might want to have your toll-free number routed to the larger office 67 percent of the time and to the smaller office 33 percent of the time. Why not use your carrier to help you maximize your workforce? This solution works for almost any scenario where you have duplicate departments across locations.

Recommendation 2: Get geographic routing

Any business with several locations, big or small, needs geographic routing. Geographic routing enables you to provide localized service to your customers. For larger, national business, this solution is even more useful. If you have to service customers in all time zones, instead of having one office that works from 8 a.m. EST to 6 p.m. PST, you can run shifts that make sense. Nobody has to wake up at 5 a.m. PST or stay at work till 9 p.m. EST.

Recommendation 3: Become your own RespOrg

The control over your toll-free numbers and protection against having them held hostage is reason enough for any large company to become its own RespOrg. See the section, earlier in this chapter, called “Understanding the role of a RespOrg,” for more information.

Recommendation 4: Get DNIS

DNIS (pronounced dee-niss) stands for Dialed Number Identification Service, and it is a feature available only on toll-free and 900 (9XX) numbers that terminate to dedicated circuits. The feature is actually a numeric code from two to ten digits embedded in your toll-free calls. The code enables your business to maintain a large number of toll-free numbers ringing into a single dedicated circuit. If you have 100 or 1,000 toll-free numbers that all receive only a handful of calls a day, you can program them into your phone system running over one dedicated circuit with only 24 available phone lines. The DNIS digits enable you to program a database that can automatically direct any inbound call to the appropriate department. As long as you don’t have more than 24 calls active on your toll-free numbers at any given time, nobody receives a busy signal.

Here’s how DNIS works. Say you have five toll-free numbers that your office has set up for specific departments:

800-555-3333 for Accounting, with a DNIS of 3333

800-555-4444 for Sales, with a DNIS of 4444

800-555-7777 for Customer Service, with a DNIS of 7777

800-555-8888 for Investor Relations, with a DNIS of 8888

800-555-5555 for the fax machine, with a DNIS of 5555

When you order dedicated toll-free numbers from your carrier, you tell the carrier the exact DNIS number you need assigned to every toll-free number. Check out Chapter 9 for all the specifics on ordering dedicated toll-free numbers.

 Tip  You can choose any quantity and series of numbers for the DNIS, but you may want to make things easy on yourself. Common practice is to use a four-digit DNIS, and to base the DNIS on the last four digits of the toll-free number, as in the five examples I list in this section. If you have over a thousand toll-free numbers, you’re more likely to have several numbers with the same last four digits. You may want to move to a seven- or ten-digit DNIS, possibly using the entire toll-free number as the DNIS or simply creating a unique DNIS for every toll-free number, with the DNIS and phone numbers having no resemblance to each other. The main reason to use part of the toll-free number as the DNIS is to make things easy. Someone has to program all the toll-free numbers and their associated DNIS numbers into your phone system. You cut down on possible programming errors if your technician does not have to cross-reference every toll-free number with a unique DNIS number.

Putting DNIS to work

This is what happens to an incoming call on 800-555-7777 for your Customer Service department when it hits your phone system:

1. Your carrier receives a call for 800-555-7777 and sends it to your dedicated circuit.

2. Your phone system sees the incoming call and sends a tone to your carrier to identify the DNIS of the toll-free number.

3. Your carrier sends the DNIS digits of 7777 to your phone system.

4. Your phone system checks the programming it has for DNIS 7777 and routes the call to the extension for Customer Service.

5. Your Customer Service department receives the call and your customer is taken care of.

 Remember  DNIS is only available on dedicated circuits that use either E&M Wink or ISDN protocol. Some older phone systems may not be able to handle DNIS and you will have to partition your dedicated circuits and send calls for specific departments over specific channels. In this scenario, you will know that calls that come in on Channels 1 through 14 are for Customer Service; calls that come in on Channel 15 are for the fax; Channels 16 through 23 are for Sales, and Channel 24 is for Investor Relations. This partitioning limits the number of toll-free calls you can automatically route to a maximum of one for every channel. If you want to set up individual route paths for 50 employees in Sales, and you only have 24 channels available on your circuit, you are S.O.L
(simply out of luck).

Recommendation 5: Get Caller ID (ANI delivery)

If you have toll-free numbers coming in on dedicated circuits and want to track the effectiveness of your marketing, or to have customers’ account information available when they call in (even before your rep has a chance to say hello), you need ANI delivery. In the simplest terms, ANI delivery is Caller ID for dedicated circuits. The phone number that originates a toll-free call isn’t always sent, and you will have to order the ANI delivery if you want to receive it. When you have this information coming into your phone system, you can begin tracking incoming calls. If you have just released a marketing blitz in Charlotte, North Carolina, you can then track all incoming calls from that area for the next seven to ten days. If you see a huge spike in incoming calls, and an associated percentage of sales, you know your marketing plan was a good investment.

 Tip  If your phone system is a bit more advanced, you may be able to take the ANI delivery information and link it up to customers’ accounts (as long as they are calling from their home or business). Using ANI delivery in this way enables your customer-care representatives to simply validate account information on-screen instead of spending time tracking it down or unintentionally introducing error by incorrectly reentering account information.

 Remember  Just as with DNIS, ANI delivery is only available if your phone system is using either E&M Wink or ISDN protocols. If this is a feature you can use, reconfiguring your hardware or buying new hardware may be a cost-effective option if your existing system doesn’t support either of these protocols. Call your hardware vendor for a quote and a timeline on how long it takes to bring this type of system together; determine the benefit to your company, and make your decision.

Recommendation 6: Get ANI Infodigits

If you have dedicated circuits and your customers frequently use pay phones to call your toll-free numbers, tracking the ANI Infodigits of the calls may be very beneficial to your business. You could be spending thousands of dollars per month in fees that are not accounted for in your business model. In the best-case scenario, you pay $5 or $10 more per month out of your profit. In the worst-case scenario, you are being hit for more money in pay phone fees every month than you are making in profit. If you’re interested in ANI Infodigits, check out the recommendations I offer earlier in this chapter for telecom businesses.

Recommendation 7: Handle overflow

If you have multiple locations that perform the same functions (order taking, customer service, and so on), you will want to have your toll-free system
set up to send overflow calls from one office to the next. If one office is inundated with calls, the calls overflow to the next office, which picks up the slack. This is also a very helpful solution if your hardware fails at one location; the overflow system automatically routes the calls to your next office without missing a beat.

 Remember  Every carrier has different features and limitations when it comes to over-flow, so you need to shop around. No industry standard is in place regarding overflow, and every network is built differently. So what you can do with a toll-free overflow plan from a carrier like WilTel you can’t do with an overflow plan from MCI. Some of the limitations of overflow you can expect to find are:

• You can only overflow between dedicated circuits that are installed in a geographically confined region. All of your circuits must connect together in your carrier’s network in the same location. If you have a circuit in Chicago, Illinois, and another circuit in Rockford, Illinois, you may be able to overflow between them. However, your carrier may not enable you to overflow calls between Rockford, Illinois, and Richmond, Virginia.

• Yes, but you can overflow lots. A variation of this limitation enables you to overflow between as many locations as your heart desires. So although you’re confined to overflow within a geographic area, you can have two offices overflowing, or seven, or anything in between, without a problem.

• Or you can’t overflow much at all, but you can do so everywhere. In yet another variation on this theme, you can overflow from an office in Miami, Florida, to an office in Seattle, Washington, but after overflowing two times (three locations, total), you may not be able to route the traffic to any other dedicated circuits.

   Warning!  Be sure to collect all of your information before you base your business on a service that may not be available. Read the fine print!

After you run out of dedicated circuits to overflow, you need to find someplace else to route your calls. Toll-free numbers that ring into dedicated circuits can only occupy as many lines as are in the circuit. If you have a T-1 circuit, you only have 24 phone lines before the next caller receives a busy signal. Regardless of how large your dedicated circuits are, each of them has a finite number of channels available. If you have any regular, nondedicated phone lines in your office, have the calls spill over to them in the event that you run out of room on your dedicated circuits.

 Remember  Overflowing toll-free numbers from a dedicated circuit to regular phone nondedicated lines probably costs more, so you should only set up this contingency if you expect this scenario to happen rarely. For example, your rate for calls that ring into nondedicated phone lines is generally more expensive than the rate for calls that go over dedicated circuits. If your dedicated rate for toll-free numbers is two and one-half cents per minute, your rate to have the calls come into a regular phone line may be five cents per minute. If you begin receiving a large phone bill for toll-free numbers overflowing to regular phone lines, you have a good reason to believe that your incoming call volume has begun to outgrow your current system. Start planning — you need to install another dedicated circuit!

 Technical Stuff  Overflow for dedicated toll-free numbers is referred to by several names. If you want to sound like a pro, you can ask your carrier to have your calls hunt from one dedicated circuit to another. Everyone should understand what you are asking for. You also hear references to dedicated trunk overflow, or just DTO. Same thing.