DID Provider – 9 Reasons Your Business Needs One

Connecting with customers efficiently is essential to a business’ success. And the ways they can connect with them are evolving, as technology emerges that not only makes it cheaper (or free) but offers new avenues for businesses to expand in many areas of their operations. Today, DID providers are opening up new worlds of communication for businesses.

By partnering with a DID provider, you open up new doors of opportunity for your company and often improve your overall corporate hygiene. 

What exactly am I talking about? Let’s look at this topic in detail.

DID Providers and DID numbers – Small changes bring big results

In some cases, changing a couple of nuances in a standard piece of technology can open up multiple doors of opportunity for a business. Sometimes it takes years as the technology continues to evolve. In other cases, the benefits are apparent overnight. One key example is the advent of DID calling, DID numbers and VoIP technology, in general.

Toll-free and international toll-free numbers allow customers to reach companies for free. They are the norm these days, and while they do the job quite well, connecting your Private Branch Exchange (PBX) system to the internet via VoIP technology has changed the game.

The benefits include: 

• Cutting costs further on calls between customers and businesses, domestically and internationally.
• Acquiring multiple local numbers from locations anywhere in the world is now cost-effective and easier than ever.
• Companies can now take advantage of new marketing strategies utilizing multiple phone numbers.
• It’s now cheaper and easier to offer direct numbers for callers to reach an individual or department within a company via a direct number.

By partnering with a DID provider, your business can benefit in multiple ways including cost savings, connecting internationally, utilizing new marketing strategies, providing direct extensions and more.

Here, I’m going to outline the benefits of partnering with a DID provider in detail. But first, to better understand how DID works and the many benefits it brings to a modern-day business, we need to understand how it began.

What is DID?

What is DID? DID stands for Direct Inward Dialing. In other areas of the world, such as Europe, it’s called direct dial-in (DDI). Today, this term generally refers to the idea that a phone number isn’t bound to a specific geographical location, but can be used from other areas of the world.

Today, service providers can route calls via a Private Branch Exchange (PBX) and on to the true location of the phone number’s owner.

The PBX can explain how the DID system originally got its name. 

In the past, a business had a separate telephone number for each of its offices. Each office had a switchboard receiving all inbound calls. Once they reached the switchboard, the caller would ask the operator to be connected to a certain person or department within the company. The operator then looked up the extension and transferred the caller. 

Later, the PBX replaced the switchboard and it was suddenly possible to automate the transferring of calls. The caller simply waited for a message and entered an extension to be connected through to the correct person or department.

However, telephone directories didn’t publish a complete list of extensions in each building. Callers with a general inquiry wouldn’t know their party’s extension and would have to call the reception desk and request to be connected to the right department. 

With the advent of DID numbers, companies were suddenly able to purchase blocks of sequential phone numbers. The last four digits of each number served as the extension for internal calls. Yet, at the same time, callers could dial in directly to the correct department simply by calling the number published for that department.

In this new scenario, a telephone company would route any calls to any number in that block to their PBX, which would sit on the primary number for that office. The PBX then detected the last four digits of the number dialed and transferred the call through to the corresponding destination.

In short, callers from outside the office building could get direct access, bypassing the switchboard and receptionist. Hence, the name “direct inward dialing”.

This is the origin of DID. However, today DID has been expanded for a wider range of uses. 

Expanding the DID System

The area code on any phone number directs calls to a certain location – an area or a city. Once that call is successfully connected to the PBX for the number they dialed, the telephone provider’s responsibility ends. 

At this point, what happens to a call is a private matter. This is where the use of DID expanded. 

When we established a way to set up a PBX to forward certain calls outside the building to a home-based worker or a separate office building, businesses leased other lines to route private calls to different buildings.

However, leased lines are quite expensive to operate. As such, business services entrepreneurs discovered a way to establish virtual private networks over public lines. 

This featured the privacy of a private network while requiring per-call charges instead of the high costs of a private cable.

This expansion of private networks outside physical office walls was made possible only when office phone systems switched from analog to digital technology. Voice data was then digitized, routed over data networks, and tagged to be identified as its own channel, despite traveling along the same wire as the data.

This type of data tagging is how the internet works. Companies were then able to connect one line of their PBX to the internet, allowing a certain extension number to be easily assigned to a phone in the building or on to a different line outside of the building.

By connecting a PBX to the internet, DID (nowadays synonymous with VoIP technology) grew to include many other services for businesses to take advantage of.

What Exactly Can a DID Provider Offer My Business?

Thanks to VoIP technology, businesses can route calls arriving at their PBX through to home-based workers. They can now also be directed via CRM software, which improves customer tracking and the quality of the service.

DID numbers, combined with digital PBXs have opened many opportunities for the development of telecommunications. 

PBXs can facilitate group calls while digitized phone systems can handle video as effortlessly as they can carry voice calls. They can even integrate calls to collaborate with social media platforms. 

With a DID provider, companies can route calls to landlines or mobile phones and the dispersion of numbers can be altered in minutes.

There are even simpler and practical benefits to partnering with a DID provider. For example, if a company relocates, they can keep a prestigious local number from their previous area code.

Let’s look at some practical examples of how DID numbers benefit a business.

9 Ways Partnering With a DID Provider Can Benefit Your Company

When you integrate DID numbers into your communication system, you open up your business to avenues of marketing, expansion, scalability, cost-savings, security and more.

Here are 9 reasons your business needs to partner with a DID provider:

1. Local Phone Number. People are familiar and comfortable with their local area codes. As such, we’re more inclined to call a local number. Being able to offer a DID number with the same area code as your clients in Washington will make them feel more comfortable calling your firm. Since DID numbers utilize SIP trunk lines and VoIP technology, your DID provider can forward DIDs to different continents easily while avoiding international fees.
2. Expand Marketing Capabilities. By getting multiple DID numbers with the area code of your choice and using each one with a different marketing campaign, you can accurately track the performance of each campaign. Customers can call the numbers at local rates and you’ll be able to quickly collect data from each campaign, such as call volume, and easily see where you should allocate your money.
3. Reduce Costs: DIDs not only give your business unlimited opportunities to offer local numbers in any location in the world – it allows you to connect with callers while avoiding long-distance or international rates.  Only one SIP trunk is necessary for multiple DID numbers, and since they are carried over the same line as data, this together means they are extremely cost-effective.
4. Better Customer Experience. Linking calls directly to the person or department the caller needs to reach is easier and saves time for you and the caller. The caller avoids hurdles like following prompts, pressing buttons or talking to a middle man.From the customer’s perspective, this can be a remarkable experience.
5. Enhanced Customer Service: When a customer calls a direct number they feel like the company is addressing their needs directly. They also may feel like they’re getting a ‘VIP’ customer experience by directly contacting the person they need. Giving your customers your direct line feels more personal than leaving them to follow prompts and press number combinations each time they need to reach you or your department.
6. Save Time: Businesses can make multiple incoming and outgoing calls at the same time, while routing callers to a person or department directly in your company. This saves you and your callers time. In the case of a smaller business, this saves time for your receptionist and alleviates call volume on your IVR. And, of course, following up on matters becomes much easier for callers when they can call their agent directly. 
7. Control & Flexibility: With a DID number, you can control where and when you receive calls. In the era of COVID 19, as teams are working remotely and becoming more mobile, a flexible calling solution is key. VoIP, DID, and SIP allows you to direct callers to your teams’ mobile phone or other temporary numbers (and email and SMS) without callers knowing these numbers. This gives you control over how your team can be reached by customers and ensures they’re always available to callers, no matter their location or day-to-day mobility.
8. Goodbye Time Zones: As I mentioned, a DID provider can automatically forward incoming calls to DID numbers assigned to customer service teams in different locations around the globe. If your business is global, you can offer support to customers in all parts of the world, 24/7, at a low cost.
9. Voice and SMS: It’s important to note that DID technology can be used for not only voice, but also SMS.

The only limit on the potential benefit of partnering with a DID number provider lies in the willingness or reluctance of a company to leave behind the traditional business systems.

While understanding how a DID provider can benefit your business, understanding how this technology works can also make it feel less complicated. 

Let’s look at how DID technology works.

How Do DID Numbers Work? 

Understanding how a DID number works can clear up any confusion or doubts you may have about the technology.

For businesses using a Private Branch Exchange (PBX), the DID number connects through the internet via an SIP trunk to your PBX. 

If your business has only one phone, then you aren’t using a PBX and calls connected via DID technology will go directly through the internet to your one phone. 

However, this is an oversimplified explanation. There are details involved with each step and the technology used along the way:

• SIP Trunk: A Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunk is what connects your phone lines to the internet. This is a key piece of DID technology. An SIP trunk serves as an alternative to traditional Primary Rate Interface (PRI) trunks. The key difference is that it’s easier to scale an SIP trunk up or down, because adding connections to an SIP trunk doesn’t require adding physical wires.
• VoIP: Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is a system that transmits phone calls via the internet. With an SIP trunk, you’ll almost always use VoIP as your connection protocol. VoIP numbers are virtual phone numbers that look the same as traditional phone numbers. Also, the calling experience is the same as the traditional experience.
• VoIP Device: A VoIP device is a phone or any other device that can make calls to VoIP numbers without special hardware or adapters. Smartphones, tablets and computers are all VoIP devices.
• PBX: A Private Branch Exchange (PBX) is a local system within a business that connects many phones to either your SIP or PRI trunk. For example, an office building with phones in many rooms or cubicles utilizes a PBX system for connecting each of these phones to your SIP or PRI trunk. It routes incoming calls to the correct phone according to the phone number or its extension.
• PSTN: A Public Switched Telephone Network (PTSN) is the traditional, common phone network that you’re familiar with and has existed for decades. A PSTN is composed of a network of switches and copper phone wires that direct incoming calls from one phone to another.
• VoIP Gateway: A VoIP gateway is another key piece to DID technology. It connects VoIP phone numbers and their devices to your PSTN, and vice-versa. A VoIP gateway will ‘disassemble’ and decode digital signals and ‘transform’ them so they can be carried over the PSTN. At the same time, a VoIP gateway can assemble and encode analogue data to be transmitted via the internet. In simple words, the VoIP gateway is what connects the internet with the PSTN.

When you put all of this together, a DID provider gives your business a virtual phone number (DID number) that uses SIP trunking and the internet to route calls through the internet.

This means that callers using traditional phone lines connected to a PSTN can call DID numbers and VoIP devices can call traditional numbers. 

In both cases, the data is processed through the VoIP gateway to make the connection between the PSTN and the internet. 

Expanding phone infrastructure in an office traditionally involved installing new wires. With VoIP DID numbers you can add multiple numbers on one internet connection, as long as you have the bandwidth to support calls to each number.

How Exactly Does a VoIP DID Provider Integrate DID Into My System?

The benefits may be quite obvious, but how complicated is it to get hundreds of DID numbers? Isn’t it expensive?

In case these technological terms have you feeling confused, don’t worry – integration is simple, fast and cost-effective.

What makes DID technology so special is SIP trunking. As I mentioned above, because one SIP trunk can serve multiple DID numbers, expanding your DID system to meet your exact needs is practically a matter of choosing the area code and the number. Your DID provider will handle the technical side of implementation.

Where to Buy DID Numbers? Where Can I Find a VOIP DID Provider?

The answer to this question is quite simple. You can get DID numbers from a VoIP DID provider.

There are a few features you’ll want to be sure your VoIP DID provider offers. This will save you time, energy and resources:

• Ideally, the DID provider also provides an SIP trunk: It’s more affordable, results in a simplified infrastructure and reduces the number of bills you’ll get at the end of the month.
• It’s also ideal if your DID provider owns and operates their own internet protocol (IP) network. A private network is more secure than a public network and it’s easier for your provider to address connection problems. 

Confirming that your VoIP DID provider can offer you SIP trunking, as well as their own IP network will guarantee you get the most cost-effective DIDs via a reliable system with the best call quality.

We are proud to say that LANCK Telecom is a leader in providing simple, cost-effective and secure DID solutions to enterprises and, even in rare cases, to telecom companies.

Because LANCK Telecom can bring our wealth of knowledge and experience from the telecom industry to this service, we ensure our DID solution is efficient, reliable and secure. 

We are a top 20 international wholesaler, joined by more than 1,500 partners in 190 countries around the globe.

With 20+ years of experience in the telecom industry as a whole, we can provide our clients with robust, reliable and cutting-edge systems in every facet of the telecom industry that we serve, including DID.

If you’re interested in finding a DID provider, your business and your customers will be in good hands with LANCK Telecom.

Final Words

Do you really need a DID number for your business? The answer depends on the type of business you’re in. But since you’re already looking at your options, there’s a high chance your business can benefit from a DID provider. 

In a world where excellent customer service is key to your business’ success, DID numbers are a simple way of offering personalized customer experiences from anywhere in the world at a low cost.

If it seems like your business could benefit from the advantages mentioned above, feel free to contact LANCK Telecom here to discuss our full service DID solution. We’re happy to answer any questions you may have about getting set up with DID numbers today.

We’ll help you decide how many DID numbers your business will need and what the most cost-effective solution is for your needs.

Our specialists are waiting for you.