November 10, 2021 // Product
Are you still running your own telecom infrastructure? While there may be good reasons to continue to do so, there might also be a growing list of reasons you should consider making the switch. Below are six signs that you are ready to find the right CPaaS.
1. The competition’s beating you with new communications features & functionality
You recently lost a customer, and you realize you have a lot of work to do to catch up. After doing some digging, you’ve realized your dev team is burdened by the distraction of maintaining your communications infrastructure, which is blocking them from focusing 100% on developing and delivering key features to your customers. Managing your own communications platform can be a monumental task, and your product may be suffering. Eliminate the distraction of running your own communications infrastructure, and enable your team to focus on improving your product — your customers will thank you for it.
2. What was once a competitive advantage has become a liability
There was a time when building your own telecom infrastructure may have been your only option, but times have changed. Whereas customers once considered it a competitive advantage they now see your ‘single-customer’ platform as a concern — especially if you have experienced a recent outage. Your customers simply expect your product to work, all the time, and any efforts spent on non-product enhancement activities, such as keeping your infrastructure operational, distracts your focus and creates a liability. How could your product, customer service, and bottom line be improved if your team was free to focus on more critical business needs?
3. You’re spending too much money managing your LCR
While you may have negotiated attractive per minute rates from multiple carriers, once you factor in the overhead of maintaining your platform and carrier relationships (including employee costs, hosting fees, hardware and software costs, monitoring and managed service fees, etc.) those low per minute wins are meaningless. Not only that, but multiple carrier contracts add complexity and increase risk. To get competitive rates from one carrier you may be forced into a contract that compromises your volume commitment to another carrier. If you fall short due to the loss of a large customer, you may be charged penalties. This delicate balancing act puts both your cost structure and your business at risk. By outsourcing your communications platform to the right CPaaS you can save substantial amounts on annual telecom costs.
4. Managing the codebase & dealing with quality issues are slowing you down
Gone are the days when you were able to make quick changes to your code. Over time, your platform’s codebase has become bloated and cumbersome, making changes and updates incredibly painful and risky. In addition, telecommunication quality issues tax your team’s valuable time and create frustrating inefficiencies on a week-to-week basis — as they attempt to get a response from a carrier on a certain route, or figure out what happened on one specific call the day before. It could be time to replace parts of your infrastructure and separate your business logic from your communications logic in order to reduce risks when you make updates and add new partners. Let someone else worry about these time-consuming quality and performance issues.
5. Your staffing levels are significant, or you are exposed
Managing carrier relationships and telecommunications infrastructure are two distinct and demanding disciplines. To do this effectively at scale, you need at least 2-3 full time engineers. Engineers that could be deployed in far more valuable ways. If you operate with less than 2-3 engineers dedicated to these efforts, you may then be overly dependent on a single resource who effectively “holds the keys” to a critical part of your business, or your engineer(s) are overworked and prone to making mistakes. With a CPaaS, you can choose to offload the management of your carrier relationship, or your communications infrastructure, or both.
6. If your data center goes down so does your business
You realize you are overly dependent on a single data center location. If there are any glitches or issues in your data center, your entire business is impacted and, in the worst case scenario, goes down. Move to a CPaaS provider with geographic redundancy and failover protection. Your bottom line (and your peace of mind) will thank you for it.