Here’s the scenario. Lady calls bank. Bank routes call to India. Nice chap in Indian call centre talks to lady. Lady can’t understand half of what he says because call quality is a bit duff. (The IVR system sounded great, so it’s not at her end.)
Here’s the business opportunity. You’re a VoIP “virtual network” operator. Deliver high quality encrypted speech over the Internet to Indian call centres. Indeed, when I use a service like SkypeOut and enter my bank’s number, you just look up first if you have a non-PSTN route to them. (Be it ENUM or proprietary technology, I don’t care.) Doesn’t need anything new in the customer’s eyes.
Customer satisfaction goes up. You take a tiny slice of revenue from your bank partner for delivering a wideband audio experience to a large public user base, many of whom are the bank’s customers. Let’s call them “origination fees” to make the analysts happy. Everyone walks away contented.
(And if you’re an old-fashioned 1st-gen VoIP operator who just cloned vanilla PSTN service, you’re out of luck. Again. The point of IP is new features and functionality, not arbitrage.)
No doubt some of the SIP-heads out there are wondering why anybody would pay someone like Skype to deliver customers when it can be done for free. Just remember, bottled water is big business, even though tap water is free. Same reason.
Now can you see why Skype might start to have a significant market value? And that some of the partners might be folks like Avaya, who stand to gain a ton of dosh upgrading call centres to new techology? How long until you can IM with the call centre agent you’re talking to, and they can just cut’n’paste stuff into their forms? Just lift stuff straight from your Skype profile? Would you use Skype or the PSTN if the former relieved you of ever waiting in a queue, and simply IM’d you back when your turn was up?
The business model is out there. You just have to look.
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