Will Global Numbers Vanish in the Call Center?
By Dries Plasman, VP marketing and product development, Voxbone
With the economy rebounding, companies are expanding internationally in search of growth. In theory, global telephone numbers should make it easy for their sales and support call centers to accompany this international expansion. Many multi-national businesses are interested in replacing their local call center numbers in many countries with a single global number, hoping that this will drastically simplify communications. But in practice, the theoretical business benefits have not yet materialized, and as a result, global numbers are on the verge of disappearing.
To be clear, global phone numbers are numbers that have a country code, but are not bound to a single country. While they are not a new concept, they are gaining attention due to the continued internationalization of economies and businesses.
A look back at the first global telephone number, UIFN
The first global numbers were created in 1988 by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), and were called Universal International Freephone Numbers (UIFNs), the global equivalent of local toll-free numbers. These numbers were released in 1996 via ITU recommendations E.152 and E.169. Each UIFN is made up of 11 digits: a three-digit country code for global service application (800 in this case), followed by an eight-digit Global Subscriber Number (GSN). The ITU distributes UIFNs, and telephony providers request them on behalf of multi-national enterprise customers.
UIFNs can be called from roughly 70 countries today. Calls are billed to the called party, making them perfect for multinational companies, government agencies and humanitarian organizations, such as the United Nations, that want to encourage people to call them by eliminating the cost of doing so. Another key benefit is that organizations can advertise a single phone number that can be used in dozens of countries as opposed to having a separate local number in each country.
However, this is just how UIFNs are supposed to work. Global telephone service providers meet annually at IISF to discuss improvements in international inbound voice services. At last year’s meeting it became clear that there is little progress with UIFNs. In 2013, UIFN numbers could be dialed from at least one network in 70 countries, a status quo compared to 2012. Furthermore, usage of the UIFN service decreased in Germany, Slovenia and the Netherlands and slightly increased in Switzerland and France.
Why not upgrade UIFNs for today’s global use?
Usage of UIFNs has remained essentially unchanged over the past five years due to several reasons:
- Many local telephone network providers, who determine themselves whether or not their customers can call UIFNs, do not allow it. For example, in most of the 70 countries where it is available, customers cannot call UIFNs from a mobile phone. This is a significant issue for call centers, considering how many callers now use a mobile phone as their primary or only phone.
- Service providers interested in activating a UIFN must go through a time-intensive process, and it typically requires a per-country activation and/or recurring fee.
- Call charges associated with UIFN are not standardized across countries, making it difficult for the organization providing that number to estimate the costs it will incur.
- Because the UIFN format makes the number look different from other types of toll-free numbers, some people are reluctant to call UIFNs.
A similar situation happened with UISCNs (global shared cost numbers), which have been available for a couple of years in a limited number of countries. The service closed in 2013. Universal International Premium Rate Numbers (UIPRNs) were created by the UN, but were never used.
Different types of global telephone numbers are just not accessible from the PSTN
Two companies, Voxbone (www.inum.net) and Bandwidth.com (www.bandwidth.com/republic-wireless), were assigned international toll numbers in the +883 global telephone number range, and integrated these numbers into a communication service. However, there was little effort to make these numbers accessible from local telephone networks. Only a dozen landline and mobile providers opened up access to these numbers, whereas many cloud communication providers, such as Skype and Google, opened up.
The United Nations was awarded +888 numbers in 2012, which should have been used by the UN’s mobile disaster intervention teams, However, they are still not in use because few operators feel motivated to open access to these numbers. Large network operators need to spend a considerable amount of time and money to configure their infrastructure to allow calls to +888. The revenue that can be earned from this service is limited, so only few operators have implemented access to +888, despite the good cause.
Because global numbers are still declining, alternative options have developed
Although our economies and people are increasingly communicating on a global scale and the benefits of global telephone numbers are obvious, the overall usage of these numbers is still declining. The main cause is a “Catch 22” situation, where landline and mobile telephone networks do not allow calls to global telephone numbers because they are used too infrequently to justify the cost of implementation – not to mention that with global telephone numbers, they put revenue for international calling at risk. Demand from multi-national enterprises and institutions, on the other hand, remains low because few operators allow calls to these numbers.
In such situations, where the free market mechanisms do not work, governments and its regulators get involved. But for telecommunications, there is no global regulator. The ITU is a global standardization body that recommends, but does not enforce. And there are local regulators who enforce only when it comes to local telephone services and numbers, but not for global telephone numbers. Until now, the European telecommunication entities have focused primarily on pricing (roaming), data protection and network security.
Over time, alternatives to UIFNs numbers have been created, enabling enterprise call centers and service providers to extend their reach internationally through the use of local telephone numbers.
- The International Toll Free Service (ITFS), where businesses or other organizations use its local telecom service provider, mostly the incumbent provider, for access to local toll-free numbers in foreign countries. Through bi-lateral agreements foreign and local service providers transfer the calls internationally.
- Direct Inward Dialing (DID) or international inbound SIP trunks, where organizations get local geographical or toll free phone numbers from foreign countries via a specialized service provider. The DID provider converts calls to a local geographical or toll-free number into a SIP trunk that is routed to the organization over the Internet or a private interconnection.
If global telephone phone numbers cease to exist, what’s next?
Considering the points above, it is highly probable that the use of global numbers on the traditional telephone network will remain marginal, and possibly even vanish over the next five years. It is also highly probable that the international expansion of the reach of multi-national call centers will be done through the use of local DID numbers (aka international inbound SIP trunks) and new technologies, such as WebRTC click-to-call applications.