Carrier Services customers will recently have received a survey from us which made it pretty clear we were reconsidering our position on origin surcharges and wanted your input on it. The title gives our slower moving “competitor” something to gossip about at Christmas parties, but for those who can read further, I wanted to share some of the results and the updated position we’ve decided to take.
Firstly, we asked customers how much they valued us not passing on origin surcharges (a.k.a ‘dirty surcharges’ but we didn’t want to load the question!). The result was pretty emphatic and a pleasant surprise with, on a scale of 0-10 (10 being highest) 90% gave it a 10 and over 96% gave us 9 or more. The average was 9.8!
The next questions sought to establish how much that sentiment carries through with actions. We know from our efforts in combating fraud that our measures are valued, yet having spent a small fortune preventing the revenue, we see support tickets about why we’ve blocked calls while they simultaneously overflowed somewhere else giving them supra-normal profits and us extra cost. That doesn’t seem fair and we’d hate the same to exist with OBR as the only winner then is those (i.e. all our peers) profiting from these filthy things. The responses were re-assuring with a majority only using Simwood and not failing over anywhere else; this is what we’re architected for and the best position to be in.
Those who are using other carriers generally have no idea what the surcharge is going to be at the time the call is routed and half of them have no idea until the bill arrives. Even those using LCRs seem only to be routing on the b-number. Herein hides a massive risk – those who are profiting from these filthy things are already making supra-normal profits simply from the blend they apply – a bubble we’re working on bursting – but what is also clear is that they could add all manner of margin into the origin element of the charge and you’d have no idea, until it was too late. It doesn’t matter if you know when you get the CDR 15 minutes later – you’ve spent the money then. That isn’t a problem we can fix beyond continuing to try to get rid of these things and imploring you not to encourage the practice with your wallet. Our recommendation to those who insist on having them in route, and do have an LCR, is to assume maximum surcharging rather than routing based on b-number price and being fleeced for the a-number surcharge!
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To digress a second, we don’t use the word ‘dirty’or the phrase ‘sleazy money grab’ lightly. While we don’t pass these filthy things on to our customers, we do make damn sure we bill counterparties for the traffic they send to our customers with improper CLI, if only to reduce the supra-normal profits they make from them. However, the very same people who are making supra-normal profits from their customers are the very same people trying to wriggle out of us levying an underlying cost on them. Furthermore, these are the very same people who while virtue signalling about Ofcom CLI changes, are incurring surcharges by not complying with those same rules and passing this traffic on to grab the margin. Talk about a double-standard.
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Returning to our survey, 0% of customers who responded pass on surcharges to their customers. These filthy things are pure overhead and risk to you, which could account for our position being valued – useful stat for Ofcom there.
Where there was some divergence in responses is how you favour our fraud and anti-arbitrage checks. We’ll route loss-making calls, so the occasional mis-configuration or what I call ‘lazy call forwarding’ will be processed by us, without us passing on the surcharges. That means some customers incur substantial cost for us without even being aware of it – one customer was surcharged for a single call more than their daily spend last week. Thankfully they don’t spend a lot but we have to contain that risk to ourselves and we do so by having a dynamic limit after which loss-making calls are blocked, in real-time. The majority of you (90%) value this and take us rejecting a call as a signal to investigate why, but 18% of you seemed to favour us not allowing loss-making/surcharged calls at all if it meant the algorithms which generate our rate sheets could then price lower. At the moment, actual cost is the major input to our sell rates so origin surcharged traffic to a (usually European) destination will blend our cost and thus sell-rates higher. If we’d rejected those calls, they’d blend lower.
We’ll take that under consideration because at the moment we do flick on this mode for persistent offenders, but it feels nice that our customers’ end users’ calls still get connected even if there’s a blip in the chain that causes us a loss. Also, we don’t want this to become so annoying that you spend money with any dinosaurs, or even the clowns, simply so they can fleece you for surcharges.
So, in terms of decisions, I’m guilty of click-bait. Over 70% of you wanted us to leave things alone and only 4% of you wanted us to introduce dirty surcharges. We’ve therefore decided to double-down on our position of not passing on these filthy things and continuing to lobby the regulator to eliminate them, as we did with dirty CPI+3.9% price increases. We love wins for fairness and transparency (here’s another one), even if we get zero credit ever for them – it’s not why we do it.
We do want to highlight something though. For those of you who have traffic which is entirely surcharged, maybe because you’re a regional incumbent operator, we introduced a feature last year whereby we could voluntarily surcharge some of your traffic so it completes, i.e. give you a different rate deck for each country you operate in on a specific trunk. Whether you put the traffic on the trunk or you have a shared switch and want us to [put it on the right trunk] based on the country code, it means your calls can complete, despite the surcharges. We promise that we’ll only ever pass on the cost of the surcharge, no profiteering on the blend and not surcharge you on destinations that do not have a surcharge! You also only pay the b-number rate we give you, no russian roulette with surcharge liability!
I hope that re-assures and, as always, we appreciate your candid feedback.
