It’s estimated that nearly $40 billion was lost due to telecom fraud in 2021, an increase of 22% since 2019.
And while no single factor is to blame, much of this cost falls on contact centers. Many leverage authentication software to combat fraudulent activity, especially contact centers in highly regulated industries like healthcare and finance.
But as enterprises moved caller authentication to cloud-based solutions, they stumbled upon a gap between the SaaS and telecom layers of their contact center infrastructure.
What’s the CCaaS integration gap?
When contact centers move to cloud-based solutions, they lose physical control over their call routing they once had via Session Border Controllers (SBCs). This advanced call routing is necessary to send voice traffic and its metadata to third-party solutions, like voice bioauthentication, and the contact center platform in real-time.
Because of this perceived loss, some IT leaders stay on-premise, others integrate third-party tools through their CCaaS platform, and others craft their own custom integrations. And while these all achieve the end goal, the first two options often lead to vendor lock-in, expensive and lengthy development periods, and in-house maintenance.
Enterprises are realizing they can bridge the divide between their cloud-based customer experience (CX) and on-premise functionality with a modern carrier.
Bridging the gap with three layers of communications infrastructure
Historically, the carrier’s network was absent from conversations around migration and integration—carriers supported these needs through their professional and managed services. With an agile carrier network, enterprise contact centers can leverage custom integrations between their inbound voice and third-party software for platform-agnostic connectivity.
With a modern carrier platform, you have three layers of communications infrastructure powering your CX:
- The network layer, which includes phone numbers, SIP trunks, emergency calling, and toll-free voice at the core of your contact center.
- The logic layer is where the carrier can manage call flows with integrations to Private Branch Exchanges (PBX) and to the Communications-Platform-as-a-Service (CPaaS) software.
- The application layer is where the User Interface (UI) and CX tools, like voice authentication and NPS, live.
This three-layer carrier network brings new opportunities to close integration gaps across call flows and SaaS products and simplify the communications landscape. It’s also why so many IT leaders are reconsidering their relationships with legacy carriers—especially when customers are at stake.
Businesses considering a move to the cloud must evaluate current carrier relationships and find a modern carrier that can underpin their cloud communications future.
2024 Enterprise Communications Landscape
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Bringing your own carrier for best-in-class communications
Find a good carrier, and they can take you anywhere. That’s why innovative enterprises have been decoupling their SIP, emergency calling, and messaging from CCaaS platforms and plugging in their own telecom through the Bring Your Own Carrier (BYOC) model.
There are many reasons enterprises choose to bring their own carriers. For large, complex contact centers, BYOC has become increasingly popular because it offers control, flexibility, and consolidation—if you bring a platform-agnostic partner.
Unbundling telecom from a CCaaS platform allows IT leaders to migrate to and move around the cloud with total control over where, when, and how it happens. In addition, carrier networks with global reach allow contact centers to scale into (or leave) territories with one partner instead of managing different network providers for niche geographies. There’s one relationship to manage, regardless of global footprint.
Lastly, a modern carrier allows you to take a piecemeal approach to migrating. Your move to the cloud should include setting up parallel SIP trunks, deploying the CCaaS platform, and then porting numbers from on-prem to cloud contact centers. Then, creating additional integrations with third-party solutions needed within the ecosystem.
