Cloud Calling: How ‘Bring Your Own Carrier’ Innovation is Transforming Direct Routing

Clever Callroute on the triple-whammy power of its smart voice integration portal

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Cloud Calling: How ‘Bring Your Own Carrier’ Innovation is Transforming Direct Routing
Unified CommunicationsInsights

Published: November 25, 2022

Simon Wright

Technology Journalist

Are you or your customers doing more talking via Microsoft Teams?

You and they are not alone.

More and more organisations are connecting voice services to the world’s biggest collaboration platform, enabling them to bring all of their communication, document sharing and videoconferencing functionality together in one place.

Thanks to ‘Operator Connect’, Microsoft has made that integration easier: giving customers the ability to associate their phone numbers with Teams with just a few simple clicks.

Trouble is, the list of verified carriers on Microsoft’s list is limited and there’s added cost.

And, for many organisations whose carriers are present, that can mean battling with clunky and time-consuming number porting elsewhere and/or procuring expensive, third-party Teams voice integration software.

Brilliantly, that is changing.

Bring Your Own Carrier is the latest innovation to connect Teams users to the world via voice – at a fraction of the Microsoft cost and quickly and easily via an intuitive portal.

Provider partners are currently small in number but are delivering big benefits for the carrier, the reseller and the end user organisation.

Getting in early is likely to put you ahead of the curve.

“It’s all about choice, simplicity and cost – a viable alternative to Operator Connect that works for all parties,” says Ewan Haig, CEO at Callroute, whose new, margin-rich, white-label voice-via-Teams solution is helping users do just that.

“The big differentiator is that we are totally carrier-agnostic. Microsoft’s list of certified carriers is currently limited to players of a certain size who have the financial resources to play in that market.

“Ours is unlimited in number or size of carrier and is growing rapidly and organically all of the time.

“Direct customers simply access our easy-to-use and highly-intuitive portal, choose a carrier from a drop down box, assign their numbers, and then connect those lines to their Microsoft Teams tenant with just a few clicks.

“For our resellers, it means they can resell any carrier’s trunks in whatever bundles they want at whatever cost they want, and offer their customers the ability to connect those numbers on a pay-per-seat basis to Microsoft Teams easily and profitably.

“For carriers, it means they are able to join our list of certified partners at no cost and instantly begin to share in that big Microsoft Teams voice market. It’s just like Operator Connect but with us as the glue in the middle and without any of the cost.”

Carriers from around the world that are new to the Callroute stable pass connectivity, reliability and security checks before their back-end coding and preferences are added to the Callroute database and templated for ease of automated portal integration.

Resellers or end user organisations that wish to contract with preferred carriers that are not on the list are able to add them via a ‘custom connect’ button within the portal.

“We’re getting requests from organisations in all parts of the world saying: ‘We work with this carrier and that carrier, can we add them to your library?’,” says Haig.

“Once we’ve done it, that carrier is also then available to other resellers and other customers.

“For organisations in the UK, we are seeing them easily move their numbers from one big, well-known carrier to another if, for example, they have been offered a better deal. They simply access our drop-down box, select the new carrier and instantly all of their phone numbers are associated with that new carrier and integrated with Teams.

“For organisations with sites in multiple countries, they can, for example, connect with carriers like Telstra for Australia, Deutsche Telecom for Germany and Gamma for the UK – all configured and managed in one place via our portal.

“It’s not only about connecting voice services to just Microsoft Teams either. There is a button for Webex and soon we will support voice via Zoom too. That’s what we mean by agility and freedom.”

The back-end smarts are clearly the key to this most clever of technological voice advancements.

But, crucially, it’s front-end simplicity and on-screen ease of us that always drives adoption.

“We have worked really hard to simplify something that is actually quite complicated,” says Haig.

“Put it this way, I could give our portal to my kids and they would very quickly work it out.”

It seems carriers, resellers and end users alike are set to share the significant spoils of the latest leg in the transformational voice journey.

And that’s definitely worth talking about..!

To learn more about how Callroute can help you and your customers businesses digitise and thrive, visit Callroute.

 

 

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