As the world becomes more and more digital-first, customers aren’t the only ones opting for easy, digital experiences. Brands are too. Companies looking for an easy way to stay connected with customers in digital channels have catapulted contact center as a service (CCaaS) platforms, powered by underlying communications platform as a service (CPaaS) technology, into some of the fastest-growing communication industries today.
While CCaaS and CPaaS technologies are helping brands to improve and streamline the customer experience, they’re not without their challenges. In this article, we’ll take a take a look at the sticking points you may experience working with a CPaaS vendor, and how we can help address them with Concentrix’s new AnyPaaS solution.
What Is CPaaS?
First off, let’s take a look at how CPaaS works. CPaaS is a cloud-based, multilayered middleware that allows you to easily add communication capabilities (such as voice, messaging, and video) into your existing applications or processes in a more customized and flexible manner. CCaaS is a great example—CCaaS solutions rely on the CPaaS layer to provide many of the most critical services. It does this through application programming interfaces (APIs). Simply put, APIs are a way for two or more applications to communicate with each other.
Next, let’s take a look at the main challenges businesses face in CPaaS deployments.
1. Flexibility
Often, once you’ve selected your CCaaS solution, you’re limited to a single CPaaS vendor. You’re tied to that vendor and it can be very difficult to change. So, if your vendor raises prices, or if you want a channel your current vendor doesn’t support, you may feel stuck. If you’ve already invested in building APIs to accommodate your unique environment, switching to another vendor can be cumbersome, time consuming, and costly—even if it’s beneficial to your business to do so.
In addition, businesses typically have a preferred cloud provider and may lack consistent data storage and reporting across their organization, which can cause a CCaaS solution to take weeks or months to deploy. All of this can leave your business vulnerable to price changes, service outages, and lack of staff to manage the technology.
Concentrix’s AnyPaaS is vendor-neutral CCaaS platform that gives you the flexibility to break free from being limited to a single CPaaS vendor and a single cloud provider. That allows you to:
- Pivot to an alternate CPaaS vendor: when things change, such as if your current vendor raises their pricing
- Add an additional CPaaS vendor: when you need a new channel that your current vendor doesn’t support
- Deploy with the push of a button: which enables you to switch in minutes, not days or weeks
The ability to quickly change CPaaS vendors while retaining the same staff and customer user interfaces ensures you get the features you need, while maintaining staff and customer experience consistency.
2. Resiliency
Some of the biggest risks with being tied to a single vendor are outages and the damage downtime can have on your business—and your ability to stay connected to your customers.
In 2022, we saw plenty of disruption to cloud services. Configuration errors, record-setting summer heat and even “an act of vandalism” were among the culprits credited for downing cloud services—downtime that can cost thousands of dollars a minute.1 Beyond the monetary cost, it’s impossible to put a price on the hit your brand can take in losing customer confidence. It doesn’t take much more than one bad experience to lose a customer nowadays.
The best defense against outages: resiliency. Resiliency reduces the vulnerability of risks/threats like service outages, bad data updates, natural disasters, etc. Unfortunately, many vendors will charge you nearly double for advanced resiliency on their platforms. And having a back-up vendor will often put you in a situation of having to pay twice.
By allowing you to switch technology vendors seamlessly without interruption, AnyPaaS provides a level of flexibility and resiliency so you always stay connected to your customers. That guaranteed resiliency includes:
- Regional data sovereignty: Allows you to stay connected to your customers no matter where they’re located, while ensuring you comply with all geographical data sovereignty requirements.
- Data resiliency: Ensures your contact center is always-on, regardless of what’s happening around you, even during an outage.
1 “The 15 Biggest Cloud Outages Of 2022,” Wade Tyler Millward, CRN, December 19, 2022.
Zaid Abu-Rashed
Senior Manager, Product Management