Every VoIP business comes with its pain points and every VoIP reseller must address them head-on to be successful. Here are some common pain points and how you can successfully navigate them.
Does a VoIP Reseller actually make money?
Yes! And no! In other words, it depends. What does it depend on? To be frank, this pain point depends largely on your white-labeler. Some white-labelers restrict resellers with dismal margins and strict requirements. While others offer higher margins with more flexibility to run your business your way.
It may seem obvious, but as a VoIP reseller, you are bound to make more money with a white-labeler that actually wants you to succeed. But how will you know if they want you to succeed?
5 Points that Prove They Want You to Succeed
1. There are no hidden costs.
Your white-labeler should tell you exactly how you will be charged and why – and note it on your bill. This transparency allows you, the VoIP reseller, to appropriately price your offering for maximum return.
2. They have the features your customers want.
Have you ever noticed that some platforms are like cable TV packages? You get a few channels (features) you actually use, and a giant pile of channels (features) you’ve never even heard of. What a waste of your time and money, right? Your provider should offer the latest features and time-tested necessities at a price point that makes it worth it for you.
3. A reseller-friendly portal.
Nothing kills revenue like a swivel-chair operation process. You’ve been there before, going from one login to the next, all to close one new customer. It’s a pain and a buzz-kill. You end up spending more time in multiple portals than building relationships and reaching more potential customers. Ensure your white-labeler has single sign-on capabilities, allowing you to reduce your time-to-close.
4. Training is easily accessible.
Whether you’re new to the business or have been around for decades, telecom is in a constant state of transformation. It’s easy to get stuck and need help from time to time. For this reason, your white-labeler should be ready, available, and willing to train you when needed.
5. Reliable service.
In addition to accessible training, reliability is a no-brainer. As a VoIP reseller, there’s one thing that can severely injure your revenue potential: unreliable service. Your customers rely on you to provide unbeatable service, which means you have to rely on your white-labeler to do the same.
All of these points contribute to your ability to actually make money. The fifth is perhaps one of the greatest influences. This brings you to the next pain point: outages.
Plagued with Outages
You may remember that the use of voice calls over IP began in the early ‘90s when everything smelled like teen spirit. VoIP seemed like nirvana for service providers. However, technical difficulties were abundant, slowing the adoption of VoIP as a major player.
Even so, VoIP pushed through its early difficulties to present businesses with opportunities to increase productivity at more affordable costs. As VoIP grew in popularity though, outages became more and more troublesome.
Yes, outages – that dirty word you never want to hear. Unfortunately, many veteran service providers are no strangers to outages. As a pain point that haunts a VoIP reseller’s waking hours, your white-labeler must be able to mitigate the risk of outages. According to a Statista report, in 2020 the average hourly downtime cost for 25% of respondents worldwide was between $301,000 USD and $400,000 USD. Can your business or your customers afford such a hit?
If you wish to avoid such a disaster, you need to partner with a white-labeler that takes reliability and high availability seriously.
Helping a VoIP Reseller Rest Easy
Human error, natural disasters, unpredictable weather – all of these can cause outages and downtime. You don’t have to worry about them with NUSO. Our built-in geographic redundancy brilliantly addresses this pain point by providing a framework for empowering service continuity, system expandability, and ease of maintenance.
Geographic redundancy is an active/active redundant application that is run on separate nodes. So, when connectivity is lost, traffic is diverted over to another node seamlessly. Without downtime!
Key benefits to NUSO’s geographic redundancy:
1. High Redundancy
Active/active operation enables each node to provide redundancy to all other nodes in the network.
2. Effective Resource Utilization
Active/active clustering actively forwards traffic to better-performing nodes to achieve maximum performance gain.
3. Load Sharing
With geographic redundancy deployment, the call processing load can be shared among multiple nodes for faster response times.
4. Fast Stateful Failover
Failover time is the best way to test the quality of a highly available system. The faster the failover, the less impact there will be on business continuity. With geographic redundancy, failover is as seamless as possible in order to maintain service and deliver the best user experience.
5. Scalability
Geographic redundancy can scale vertically for capacity expansion and horizontally for greater performance gain. Meaning as your seat count grows, your redundancy grows with you.
6. No Single Point of Failure
At least one alternative path for traffic flow is always available, providing the highest levels of continuity and availability.
7. Perform Maintenance with Zero Downtime
Upgrading and patching hardware and software can mean going offline for a period of time. With n-Share, maintenance can be performed any time it is required, without having to plan for downtime. Minimizing downtime dramatically improves business continuity, without burdening IT, impacting performance, or affecting user productivity.
8. Disaster Recovery
Geographic redundancy protects against site-level failures, from natural disasters to man-made failures, such as configuration errors and overwhelming service demand. You can even test your disaster-recovery scenarios in a non-disruptive manner by temporarily downing your network after hours, etc.
9. Protection from DDoS Attacks
Geographic redundancy’s ability to replicate services across nodes offers highly effective, fault-tolerant protection against high-volume attacks designed to bring down critical business applications and resources.
As a VoIP reseller, you know that business continuity and disaster recovery can be huge pain points for you and your customers. Why not choose a reliable, resilient, and available voice network? NUSO’s fully redundant, highly available network helps you mitigate human error and infrastructure failure, ensuring maximum uptime.
To File Or Not To File – FCC Compliance
Did you know that as a VoIP Reseller you are required to comply with the FCC guidelines? FCC compliance on the surface seems daunting and a bit of a nightmare, hence why filing can be a large pain point for most resellers. However, a few hours of work on this pain point are worth it when the alternative is costly fines and legal ramifications.
There are a few basic steps to achieve compliance:
1. Register in your home state, with:
- Your secretary of state
- Your department of revenue IF REQUIRED: Your state’s public commission.
2. Register with the FCC
3. OPTIONAL: Additionally, you could obtain a state-level telecommunications registration
Tax Deductions
As a VoIP Reseller, your business is entitled to certain tax deductions. These deductions are covered under Section 179 of the IRS tax code. Basically, this tax deduction allows U.S. companies to deduct the full price of qualified equipment purchases. The Section 179 deduction for 2021 is $1,050,000, with a “total equipment purchase” limit of $2.62 million (up from $2.59 million in 2020). Luckily, it includes both new and used qualified equipment.
Also, U.S. businesses can take advantage of 100% bonus depreciation on both used and new equipment for the whole of 2021.
SPAM and Your VoIP Reseller Business
Because you are a VoIP Reseller (or want to become one), you need to worry about spam and fraud and how to stop it in its tracks. After all, it’s one of the biggest pain points of voice customers as a whole, not just resellers and their customers.
Your customers trust you to keep scammers, robocalls, and spam at bay. Nothing can put a bad taste in their mouth more than fraud can. That means you need to offer a solution that minimizes spam and actively works against these scammers.
However, you shouldn’t be the only one worrying about it. A trustworthy white-labeler should have several measures in place to keep fraud and spam at a minimum. Such as active network monitoring to prevent performance issues and traceback initiatives to hunt down any fraud detected. They should additionally ensure a level of call security by utilizing STIR/SHAKEN, Voice CAPTCHA, and Reputation Scoring. These measures actively thwart toll fraud, phishing, SPAM, DoS, and call interception.
Frying SPAM
NUSO is a unique white-labeler that actively fights against spam. We are one of the few providers that own our own network. Which means we take pride in keeping it in tip-top shape. Our active network monitoring ensures smooth services 24/7/365. Moreover, our call security measures help stop attackers before they get anywhere near your customers.
At NUSO, we handle the complicated security measures so that you don’t have to. Read more about our SPAM, illegal robocalls, toll fraud, and scam countermeasures here.
E911 Regulations for VoIP Resellers
There are so many laws and regulations that those in the communications space must adhere to. Although it may seem daunting, E911 safety regulations, Kari’s Law, and the RAY BAUM’s Act were put in place to help ensure users’ safety and reachability. Not having 911 capabilities baked into a solution is a major risk to both you and your customers. As a VoIP reseller, you may be feeling unsure of all that needs to be done to keep your customers safe and meet all legal requirements necessary.
Your white-labeler must be a partner that you can rely on to maintain a reliant platform and walk you through these laws and regulations.
Keeping Your Customers Safe
At the end of the day, your customers’ safety is our top priority. As the world shifts and evolves and remote work continues to expand in popularity, you have to make sure your customers are taken care of should an emergency arise. NUSO has built our services to protect you and your customers. As a VoIP reseller of ours, you can trust that we maintain our end of the compliance requirements and always assist you with your requirements.
Looking for more information on E911, Kari’s Law, and the RAY BAUM’s Act? Read more here.
Pain Points Solved
Helping ease all your pain points is vital to how NUSO does business. Whether you’re trying to find your customer that perfect product with great uptime or want to become well versed in all of the compliance issues that plague telecom, you can depend on us!
As a NUSO reseller, we help all of your pain points become a nonissue. We’re here to help you navigate the VoIP reseller field, and can’t wait to help you succeed! Interested in becoming a NUSO Partner? Find out more information and reach out here.
