In many of my previous Voice over IP tips, I've stressed the many ways in which organizations can save money by switching from conventional telephony to its IP counterpart. This lesson is not unknown to many companies, and is starting to show some interesting impacts on our marketplace. Cheap (or no) long distance charges seem bound to accelerate offshoring, because IP telephones can reduce (or remove) the long distance charges associated with setting up offshore operations that must be readily accessible to onshore customers.
In fact, there are entire classes of business that IP telephony may help to move offshore. These include the following:
- Technical support operations: These have been a mainstay of offshoring anyway, often to exploit the availability of cheap workers outside prime time working hours. Given English-speaking professionals' willingness to work off hours (for them) and to work prime calling hours in the US, more and more companies are moving technical support outside our borders.
- Telemarketers: Employees need only share a common language with their customers nowadays, since Internet access is a given everywhere in the world. Those who operate outside US borders are not subject to "do not call" restrictions, and they can hire telemarketers for even less money than their US counterparts are paid.
- Boiler room operations: anybody who's ever fended off phone calls from individuals of varying degrees of reputability
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- seeking to sell securities by phone had better brace themselves for an onslaught of such calls from outside the US (where our securities laws and regulations do not apply).
- Scams galore: Though boiler room operations may or may not be scams, they often seek to inflate the value of low-cost securities by creating demand where it otherwise might not occur. Outright scams take this one step further, and attempt to part people from their money without providing anything in return. This can range from bogus charitable solicitations, to sales of products or services that are never delivered, and so forth.
Although carriers and content filtering services can come up with ways of dealing with so-called SPIT (spam over Internet technology), which is typically generated automatically, it's much more difficult to deal with calls from companies using IP telephony outside the US. I suspect we'll see the development of blacklist screening technologies for both country codes and originating phone numbers along with whitelists to enable individuals or organizations to create exceptions to otherwise blocked access attempts. So if you are company interested in legitimate offshoring, expect to deal with these obstacles in the near future.
One thing's crystal clear: low costs for IP phone service and low hourly rates paid to phone workers will create market opportunities outside our borders that many of us may come to dread.
Ed Tittel is a regular contributor to numerous TechTarget Web sites, and the author of over 100 books on a wide range of computing subjects from markup languages to information security. He's also a contributing editor for Certification Magazine, and edits Que Publishing's Exam Cram 2 and Training Guide series of cert prep books. E-mail Ed at etittel@techtarget.com.
This was first published in April 2005