When CCaaS providers started bundling telecom services, it always seemed like a bad idea to us – as a telecom services provider (disclaimer: we are biased). Unfortunately, the invisible hand which drives the free market isn’t always right, and so the market did as market does – letting convenience take the steering wheel until it encountered the wall of reality.
The convenience of CCaaS-bundled-telco caused buyers to gloss over the implicit shortcomings of this approach, until recent events and industry trends brought these shortcomings to the forefront.
| You give up control over telecom for sake of convenience and a single invoice.
In this technological Faustian bargain, organizations give up control over telecom for sake of convenience and a single invoice. Unfortunately, by the time the practical impact is apparent, it is usually because of some mission critical issue or inability to accommodate a key strategic architecture requirement. Below are some examples of the issues we have seen (and have been able to help with):
CCaaS Outage Mitigation
Look no further than the AWS outage a few weeks ago, which impacted a number of CCaaS solutions which run on AWS.
CCaaS outage is a telecom outage – The AWS outage brought down telecom services along with CCaaS, because the underlying plumbing critical to CCaaS telecom is inextricably tied to the cloud platform CCaaS runs on. There is no CCaaS telecom outside of the CCaaS platform (unless you opt to run your own SBCs and on-prem SIP Trunking, which has its own downsides).
Failover, what failover?! – CCaaS telecom services are generally not able to seamlessly fail over to another platform or even another instance of the same solution (US-WEST vs US-East for example). So you can have multiple instances, legacy on-prem UC, or decide to use MS Teams as a DRP solution, but this will not work unless you can get calls from the CCaaS platform to your DRP solution (while the CCaaS is down).
AI / Multi-Platform CCaaS
Although AI tends to be “Digital First” a material portion of omni-channel interactions is still driven by voice. Not being able to handle voice with AI… or the cost of doing it sub-optimally via CCaaS telecom, very quickly becomes an inconvenience (and a cost driver, diminishing the AI ROI). The ability to route calls at the telephone network layer is gone, once your telephone network is your CCaaS.
| The ability to route calls at the telephone network layer is gone, once your telephone network is your CCaaS.
Your AI strategy may be jeopardized by inflexibility of your telecom services, driven by the desire to have a single invoice.
Telecom-Centric Tools and Features
Admittedly, the value of these may only be relevant to enterprises or high-volume mid-market organizations, but the CCaaS approach to telecom is by design one of diminished importance. As usual, lack of control drives lack of flexibility and features. So by design, CCaaS-bundled-telco lacks some of the reporting, management and administrative functionality that stand alone solutions provide.
Yeah… Like What?
- Call Failure Reporting – by design, it is impossible for CCaaS platforms to flag and report calls which the platform failed to answer. It happens more frequently than you’d expect (we have an alert exactly for this).
- STIR/SHAKEN – Not all platforms provide STIR/SHAKEN enabled telecom services. Keep in mind STIR/SHAKEN is governed by country. US STIR/SHAKEN infrastructure is separate from Canadian STIR/SHAKEN.
- Multi-Carrier redundancy – Not having “grown” up in the telecom age, many CCaaS providers do not understand how to manage multi-carrier Toll Free services or see value in doing so.
- CNAM – some CCaaS solutions do not offer CNAM, which although not incredibly useful for B2C, has its place in B2B communications, particularly with high-value callers/customers (Brokerage, B2B relationships, Wealth Management, etc).
- Customization / Integrations – another byproduct of simplicity is that it has to be cookie cutter. CCaaS-bundled-telco does not play well with others, outside of the pre-configurable options. This includes voice integration with 3rd party AI platforms, but also integration with PCI Payment solutions, Transcription/call analytics, compliance recording, MS Teams connectivity and others
- Add-on features – Features which Star Telecom and other carriers are deploying including caller fraud detection and prevention, Caller ID reputation monitoring and management, MOS/call quality alerting and other telecom-specific value-adds which you will not find in the CCaaS-bundled-telco stack
- Support and troubleshooting – Last but definitely not least is the approach, urgency and skill to troubleshoot telecom issues. On a scale from “everything working well” to “complete outage” there is a range of more frequent issues which impact telecom. The list is really too long to cover here, but the common denominator is that these require a certain level processes, technology and people which are focused on telecom (SIP voice). Almost universally, these are not available at Tier 1 CCaaS support. These ultimately impact cost (by driving it up) and customer experience as measured through NPS (by driving it down).
So What Now?
Luckily there is a range of BYOC solutions and offerings, including from Star Telecom, which enable CCaaS customers to take back control of their telecom services and engineer failover, carrier redundancy and proper monitoring while extending telecom reach across CX/CCaaS/AI and UC solutions. The simplicity comes included – because we are
Whether you are using Five9, Genesys Cloud, TalkDesk, RingCentral or almost any of the other platform, the BYOC approach will augment platform benefits with additional redundancy, flexibility, functionality and cost savings.
If you want to break free of the CCaaS-bundled-telco, Contact us or have a look at what some of our clients are saying.