There is no denying that, for the most part, the number portability regime in the UK is in need of some love and attention. It’s riddled with problems and is often exploited by those with nefarious intent to un-level the playing field.
Here at Ziron, we don’t want to leverage that situation for our own personal gain. Unlike some in the industry, we don’t want to charge our customers through the nose for honest mistakes.
Peel back the mask of virtue from some of our competitors, and you find some interesting facts.
If someone attempting to export your numbers gets the wrong name on a Letter of Authority for a 100 DDI port, there’s one wholesale provider that’ll charge you, yes you, the Losing Provider, £250 for the privilege of some random third party making that mistake. Or worse; they are profiting from someone trying to slam your customer and providing you with a perverse incentive to let it happen too!
Whilst they’re off to the Aston Martin showroom, rubbing their hands with glee, Ziron instead is focusing on automation, such as our industry leading APIs, to make a system that is rotten to the core, as palatable as possible for our customers. We are also engaged in constructive dialogue with our partners and across the industry to try to improve the situation.
What do we charge for the privilege of losing a number? £0-13 depending on the scenario, and it isn’t a profit centre, it merely represents a fraction of the cost we incur internally and is only ever the direct cost from our upstream partners. And it’s never, ever, levied “regardless of outcome”, only if a number is successfully exported and if it’s one of the few scenarios with a direct cost. Losing a customer is frustrating enough without salt being rubbed into the wound by your upstream partner.
In fact, when it comes to mistakes on imports, if you’re on the Wholesale Tariff, we know you do a fair volume, so there’s a free of charge allowance of 6 rejections, date changes and cancellations a month. Our customers are awesome, but are (as far we know) only human and we know mistakes happen – so for Standard Tariff customers and outside the allowance on the Wholesale Tariff, the charges are modest and a fraction of those levied by the marauding sharks in our industry.
As part of our ‘no strings attached‘ philosophy we don’t automatically reject so-called “wholesale porting”. Yes, a conversation needs to be had because it’s a lot of work and there are costs involved – and there’s no regulatory obligation for us to provide it. But will you catch us holding a gun to your head because another network has a better set of functionality to service your end user? No. Would you like some assurances in your contract? Absolutely fine, give us a call and we’ll see what we can do.
It’s incumbent on us to provide industry leading products and services that keep our customers coming back to us because we meet their needs the best, not to conduct business by keeping our partners hostage.
At Ziron, we are proud of our no-commitments and flexible approach to relationships; it’s a part of everything we say and, most importantly, what we do. Which includes not introducing such barriers by stealth either.