In the fast-paced and demanding world of telecommunications, where new technologies and challenges are always around the next corner, Adam Zeibig, Carrier Manager at VCC Live, is always seeking for a win-win scenario. Read the VoIP.Review exclusive interview with Adam, in which he discusses his experience, motivations, and challenges working in the telecommunications sector, as well as his outlook on the future of AI and IoT in telecoms.
Tell us about VCC Live and about your role in the company.
VCC Live is a cloud-based contact center software providing company that is headquartered here in Budapest. But we also have legal entities in Germany and the United States. At the time I started here in the company, which was one and a half year ago, a little bit more than one and a half year ago, we had roughly 65 employees working for us, but during that time we hired at least 35 or 40 people and the company ended up right now employing 102, or even more than a hundred people. It’s an international, diverse company. We have employees working for us from Brazil, from the United States, and then we recently hired employees from Vietnam and the Philippines, just to make sure that when the company is expanding, we have the right people in place.
I am responsible for the wholesale activities of the company, mainly onboarding new carrier partners, negotiating the prices with the carrier partners and also, managing the routing for the voice platform. I’m trying to make routing cost the least, but the most important thing is quality, obviously. I’m always trying to set up our routing to provide the best quality at the lowest price for our customers and also for our company.
What do you do in regards to personal development? What motivates you?
What more motivates me as well in the business area is that I always try to make the best deals out of a negotiation. So when there is a price negotiation, I try to be successful and I try to get a win-win result. So both the partner I’m negotiating with and also myself should be able to come out happy from the negotiation table.
What was the best day at work you have had in the past few months?
This is a good question. I think after this long Covid time, my best day was really when I first came into the company after a long time, and I had a 4-5 hour long face to face meeting finally with the CTO and we discussed a lot of telecommunication related business activities that we are doing here in the company. Also, technical related matters. And from a business point of view, I was able to bring in a globally recognized major telecommunication partner to the company, and I was able to make the SIP trunk, the interconnection, and also I negotiated out fairly good terms from the contract and they have also signed the contract. So, this was one of the most successful periods during this previous half year.
What is the most challenging part of your work?
The biggest challenge I face, but also many European carriers too, is that the European Union is taking over national jurisdictions over the price settings. So, they are maximizing the prices for fixed and mobile terminations. And this price maximization will be gradually introduced, but I need to trace it down, track it down to each and every partner. So, I have to make sure that each and every partner of VCC Live lives up to this regulation and the correct price level will be adjusted.
Big opportunities can come from the technical side, especially with the introduction of 5G, which was not an immediate introduction due to the pandemic. It was a gradual introduction, but the 5G related services, such as IoT and cloud services, will face increased demand from customers because the service will get much faster and the quality will be much better. Also, AI could have a huge impact, especially on the technical side. AI could improve the quality of the calls and the quality of the services that the customers are getting in general.
