Most carriers are happy to sell a call center termination knowing full well they cannot complete the calls your dialer attempts. The rate sheet will not tell you that. The sales rep will not volunteer it. You find out three days after you sign, when the data comes back and your agents are talking to silence.
This post is the checklist we would want if we were on your side of the table. It works on any provider, including us. Walk a sales rep through it, and the ones who dodge half the questions answer the question for you.
Why per-minute price is the wrong first question
Cheap routes are not cheap. They recover their margin somewhere, and on a dialer that somewhere is usually false answers and dead air, aggressive throttling, or routing your traffic down a chain of cheapest-available downstream carriers whose behavior you inherit.
So price is the last question, not the first. Decide which carriers can actually carry your traffic at quality, then compare price among the ones that pass. A route that is two-tenths of a cent cheaper and burns a third of your talk time on silence is the most expensive route you can buy.
The metrics to ask for, with benchmarks
Make the provider put numbers next to these. Vague answers are themselves a data point.
- ASR, answer seizure ratio. The share of attempts that connect. Strong is 60 percent and up, 40 to 50 is acceptable, under 40 deserves scrutiny, premium routes run above 80. Dialer ASR runs lower by nature, so trend it per route rather than trusting one figure.
- ACD, average call duration. A healthy ACD reflects real conversations. An ACD near zero to one seconds means calls connect and drop instantly, the classic bad-route signature.
- PDD, post-dial delay. The gap between dialing and the call going through. Under five seconds is the target. Over seven or eight and the person hangs up before your agent is bridged in.
The capacity questions carriers dodge
This is where the quiet games live, and where most operators forget to push.
Ask for your CPS ceiling, calls per second, and your concurrent-channel ceiling, in writing. Predictive dialers burst hard, and an unstated cap will throttle you without warning. A common trick is a plan sold as "100 channels" that quietly starts rejecting calls past eighty to push you toward an upgrade. Another is a gateway that simply returns errors once your dialer exceeds a CPS limit nobody told you about, so your dialer reads it as "idle" instead of "blocked."
Then ask the follow-up most operators skip: what is your published channel ceiling, and can I burst above it the same day or do I file a ticket and wait? A provider that is straight with you answers this with a number. One that hedges is telling you something.
Red flags
If you see these, keep shopping:
- Non-CLI or grey routes. A direct path to the spam folder, and they fail STIR/SHAKEN.
- No STIR/SHAKEN signing. Not optional for US termination.
- Won't show CDRs. If you cannot audit your own call records, you cannot catch dead air or false answers.
- No live-traffic trial. A provider confident in their route lets you test before you sign.
- A pitch that leads with the per-minute price. If the cheapest rate is the headline, ask what is being traded to hit it: completion, signing, or support.
- ASR and ACD they won't commit to in writing. Opacity is the answer.
Green flags
What a route built for dialer traffic looks like:
- A route you can test on live traffic before you sign, judged on completion and not on a slide deck.
- CDRs you can pull and audit yourself.
- STIR/SHAKEN signing on every outbound call.
- A published channel ceiling and a straight answer on bursting.
- Same-day turn-up. Sign today, terminate today, credentials in hours not days.
- Clean, health-checked DIDs on the same network, so origination and termination are not stitched across vendors.
- A human to call in the first 72 hours, not a ticket queue.
Those are the things our termination product is built around, and they are the things worth holding any carrier to.
The 60-second test before you sign
You do not need a procurement process to vet a route. You need one live batch and your own CDRs.
- Run a small live batch through the new carrier on the same scrubbed list you are running today.
- Pull the call detail records.
- Check ASR, ACD, PDD, and the dead-air rate against your current carrier, side by side on the same data.
- The winner is obvious, and it is measured on your traffic, not their slide deck.
A termination carrier is infrastructure, not a logo. The right one is the one whose numbers hold up when you run your own calls through it and read the records yourself. Everything above is just how to make sure you are reading the right numbers before you commit, instead of three days after. When you are ready to pick numbers and routing in volume, the bulk DID and termination side of the network is built for exactly that.