Many businesses have operations in South Africa and the UK; however, communication costs can quickly get out of hand and even become prohibitive if multinational businesses do not have a solution to comply with local, in-country call rates, explains Telviva Chief Commercial Officer Rob Lith.
South African businesses face significant challenges when communicating in the UK, he says, especially in light of recent telecommunications regulatory changes in South Africa, which caused international call termination rates to increase 27-fold overnight. “As one can imagine, this made international communication prohibitively expensive for many businesses with teams sitting in multiple countries,” he says.
Leading Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) and Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) business, Telviva recently launched its Telviva Software International (TSI) service through Telviva One, aimed at benefiting South African businesses with UK-registered entities. Telviva’s presence in Amazon AWS in Ireland enables it to deliver the solution.
Commenting on the operational complexity that led to the service being developed, Lith says organisations with operations in both South Africa and the UK share multiple communication challenges. “For starters, there are different telecommunications regulations in each country. Beyond that, there are high costs of maintaining separate communication infrastructures, over and above the challenges of maintaining seamless team communication across borders. Then, businesses need to worry about managing local number presentations and call rates,” says Lith.
He says that telecommunications regulations in the UK are particularly strict, no doubt a foreshadowing of where South Africa’s environment is headed. “Businesses need to be able to navigate these requirements, such as Telephony Service Preferences to be complied with, restrictions on abandoned calls, limitations on repeat calling and mandatory live operator presence for certain call types. Non-compliance fines in the UK can seriously bite,” he explains.
He says that Telviva One’s international communication platform addresses these problems by allowing users to switch, seamlessly and easily, between UK and South African communication personas and present local numbers in each country. “Importantly, this enables calls at local rates,” he explains. “The business needs to be registered within the UK or a UK Crown Dependency, which enables full compliance with international telecommunications regulations. In addition to this, there are free internal calls within the UK and SA operations.”
Lith explains that the solution maintains minimal, imperceivable call latency with significant reductions in communication costs. A handy functionality is the simple transfer of calls between UK and SA offices, as well as the ability to work with a single provider for the solution in SA, as well as the UK.
Summarising the latest addition to Telviva’s rapidly growing suite of offerings, Lith explains: “Being in both markets and understanding shared business challenges, we knew we needed to develop a solution that would alleviate the communication obstacles for businesses with operations in South Africa and the UK or a UK dependency. By effectively designing a service that enables users to switch between local communication personas, the service allows companies to make use of local numbers and rates, effectively reducing the financial and compliance burden of international communication,” says Lith.
