[asterisk-users] Managing the spiralling costs

[David Backeberg]

On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 9:10 PM, Vikas <topgun9 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have been using the inbound 800 services from vitelity. Slowly the
> usage has been rising and in the month of Jan the bill was for $650. I
> am currently on a 1.9 cents a minute plan. Am I paying too much ?

I don't pay the bill, so I could be wrong about this, but I believe
we're on a 1.7 minute plan for inbound tollfree. But we negotiated
that with historicals that are about 15 times your calltime; and we
have about three-hundred toll-frees.

$580 versus $650 isn't a huge savings, and we pay a lot of base rate
for having lots of lines and lots of numbers pointed at those lines.

Let's assume that you can hire another phone person at US minimum
wage, in a low wage state, in an effort to get more simultaneous
people on, to reduce your hold time. They would cost more than your
phone bill.

If there's any way to have your customers answer their own questions,
perhaps using a phone-based touch-tone IVR, that would help, then
encourage people to use a website that does the same thing.