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While Skype wasn’t the first company to allow Internet calling, Skype was one of the first companies to make Internet calling work for the masses. Whether doing a Skype-to-Skype call for free or calling any phone for very little, people have spent over 520 million minutes on average every day talking to people with Skype. Since the beginning, our primary objective has been to deliver the best quality experience at a low price.

Our dedication to quality has allowed our community to grow fast – our average monthly connected users grew from 91 to 124 million in the last year alone (June 2009 – June 2010). We will continue to build products and features with the level of quality that keeps our community connecting with one another.

Customer feedback

In fact, one seemingly simple feature that the Skype team hears loudest is our end of call customer feedback, where everyone has the opportunity to rate their experience after they make a Skype call (depending on which version you are on). This direct customer feedback allows Skype to improve our services in near real-time and more importantly allows our community to tell us what is working and what needs improvement.

So what exactly are we doing with the feedback you are giving us and why is it important? Every score we receive is used to rate customer experience for our different desktop products. For people making paid calls to regular phones, we use the feedback to rate our carrier partners.

Working with partners

In order to deliver Internet calls to landline or mobile phone numbers, we rely on our telecom partners to connect calls to telecom networks globally. It is common practice in the Internet communications space to rely on a few telecom partners and aggregators to deliver calls globally as this tends to be the most cost effective way to offer cheap calling.

We at Skype have taken a different approach. In addition to using aggregators, we aim to work with local partners who actually own the networks available in their home markets. This, is in our opinion, is the only way to deliver good quality of service. Most importantly, this approach gives us the choice to select the best performing partners for each network.

In practice, this means that at any given time we have more than one partner delivering calls into a given country or network. The number of calls each partner receives is defined by you – our customer. The higher the feedback score per partner, the higher the volumes that partner receives.

Experience in Argentina

One good example is Argentina. Average feedback scores for calling Argentina were lower than overall scores in South America. This prompted us to start looking for local options. After establishing cooperation with a major local network operator, we saw feedback scores rise sharply – from 3.5 to 4 out of 5 maximum. At the same time, call volumes increased over the next three to four months.

We appreciate your help in improving our products. By taking two seconds to give us feedback after a call with Skype, you can help to directly influence the service quality.

Some companies may decide to cut corners to get a feature into the market earlier or save some money at the expense of their customers, but at Skype, we remain committed to providing the best quality products and services to our community, period