This week`s landmark ruling by the Supreme Court that declared least-cost routing (LCR) legal, opens doors for Orion`s other cost saving services.
The Supreme Court ruled this week that cellular LCR is legal, providing relief for thousands of companies that use this service to save up to 40% of their cellphone costs. Judge de Villiers dismissed the case brought by Telkom against several players in the industry and awarded all costs, expected to amount to about R4 million.
Where other cellular LCR providers may be tempted to take a "go wide" approach, Orion will continue to concentrate in areas where it has outperformed the market, including Telkom.
"Our aim was never to be the biggest, but rather the best. Being biggest was something that would come over time, as we built our brand and a reputation for service excellence," says Don Tredoux, MD of Orion Cellular.
"Our focus has always revolved around key account strategies, and through this structure and attention to detail, we have been able to respond to market requirements," added Jacques du Toit, National Sales and Marketing Director. "The advantage of a dedicated development team has enabled Orion to deliver innovative solutions to old problems. Our clients are our eyes and ears, and they lead us to the next opportunity - basically a `win-win` relationship."
"Most of our future growth will be found from within our existing client base, from ongoing roll-outs of large national contracts, both with traditional LCR and other value-added services. A suppressed telecommunications environment has created a pent-up demand for additional opportunities and we at Orion have positioned ourselves to take advantage of this void," added Du Toit.
Orion`s Tredoux pioneered the concept of cellular LCR back in 1996, taking nearly six months to convince the first corporate client - a large bank - to try the system out. The rest is history and today the industry turns over in excess of R1 billion annually.
Orion has always been committed to finding value for its clients in an inflated market, and since the commercialisation of cellular LCR, it has developed and perfected other cost saving telecommunications services which can, in conjunction with cellular LCR, improve bottom line figures dramatically.
The first of these is the Intertel international service for voice and fax calls, where Orion is now able to save 50% on Telkom`s charges to most destinations. For companies that already do a lot of international business, this is good news and for companies that want to make more calls but can`t afford to, it opens up more trading opportunities.
Another cost saving service is 08:4free which is a cellular call-back service that works on a reverse charge basis. The person calling pays nothing and the company pays the call back to the employee in the field. The saving comes in firstly because the call back is much cheaper than the call that the employee would have paid and secondly because no end-of-month clerical work is needed to refund calls made to the company.
SMS is another cost saving service that Orion offers - especially from the convenience of the desktop. A short analysis of the average call centre traffic patterns will show that up to 40% of outgoing calls can be replaced with SMS - representing a saving of about 30% on the Telkom account.
Orion`s obsession with customer service means that all of these services add value to the company in some way or other too. An example is daily monitoring to ensure that each installation is functioning correctly and savings are optimised.
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