The biggest telephony cost driver in Genesys Cloud is not the per-minute rate - it is idle trunk capacity.
At our 5,000-agent BPO, we pay for BYOC Cloud trunk capacity based on peak concurrent sessions. But our WFM data shows that 60% of trunk capacity sits idle between 10 PM and 6 AM. We renegotiated our carrier contract to a burstable model that charges for actual usage, saving us 35% on our monthly telecom bill.
Don’t forget recording storage costs.
Every recorded interaction consumes S3 storage. If your retention policy keeps recordings for 7 years (as required for some financial services), the cumulative storage cost can exceed your telephony spend. We export recordings to Glacier Deep Archive after 90 days, cutting long-term storage costs by 95%.
You can automate the cost optimization using a low-code iPaaS connector.
We built a Workato recipe that monitors the GC usage API daily. If the concurrent trunk utilization drops below 30% for 3 consecutive days, the recipe triggers an alert to the telecom manager suggesting a capacity reduction. No code required - just drag-and-drop connector blocks.
When we migrated from Zendesk Talk, our telephony costs actually decreased by 20%.
Zendesk bundles the telephony into a flat per-agent fee that includes a hidden margin. Genesys Cloud’s BYOC model lets you bring your own carrier at wholesale rates. If you negotiate directly with a carrier like Bandwidth or Telnyx, the per-minute cost is significantly lower.