Migrating your contact center makes a lot of sense—and eventually, businesses will have no other choice than to adopt some cloud-based CX tools.
Innovation, ROI, scale, flexibility, and a distributed workforce make Contact Centers as a Service (CCaaS) adoption imperative. To get there, large, global enterprises are “unbundling” their PSTN connectivity and taking the Bring Your Own Carrier (BYOC) route.
The benefits of BYOC for your contact center
BYOC is now widely adopted for both employee phone systems and contact centers. One 2022 report (Metrigy) found that 42.2% of enterprises were already unbundling their voice communications from their software platform in 2021. Another 33.3% planned to BYOC throughout 2022.
BYOC offers more control, flexibility, and vendor consolidation—leading multinational organizations with complex call flows and needs right into their arms.
1. More migration control
BYOC lets you 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 is needed within the ecosystem.
Porting is the riskiest aspect of moving CX to the cloud: it’s a perfect storm of varying carrier requirements, regulatory red tape, and lack of support. This is why unbundling telecom from CCaaS platforms can give enterprises greater control over migrations, and even reduce friction when moving around.
Carrier tools like porting APIs and dashboards can make moving to and around the cloud so much easier. In addition, some carriers are platform-agnostic to help avoid vendor lock-in and optimize cloud-to-cloud migrations. This is especially valuable as new platforms emerge and evolve alongside CX requirements.
2. Lower costs
Keeping your contact center on-prem gives you full autonomy over factors like call flow, and which tools to imbed in your voice environment. However, maintaining on-prem equipment is no longer efficient or cost-effective, especially for businesses seeing massive growth in the voice channel.
BYOC can offer reduced costs for both contact center and unified communications use cases, giving organizations granular billing details and the ability to understand how they’re consuming services. Plus, organizations pay only for the communications services they use, rather than paying for a per-seat, per-user package.
When you BYOC, your carrier may also offer preferred pricing and volume discounts as you scale, making both your software platforms and the power behind them even more cost-effective.
3. Customer experience (CX)
Your toll-free voice provider has an impact on almost every other element of your CX. Most businesses select their contact center platform first, leaving the carrier as an afterthought. This leaves crucial contact center metrics, resiliency, and business continuity as afterthoughts and downplays the impact of a poorly designed network infrastructure.
With a cloud-native carrier, you can prioritize customer experience and lay a solid foundation to craft a contact center with high-quality calling, carrier-level integrations with conversational AI and caller authentication, and more.
You’re expected to create a comms stack made up of the industry’s best and brightest CX tools. As you move different parts of your comms stack off-prem, gaps will arrive that limit you from rebuilding the same ecosystem in the cloud.
BYOC helps bridge that gap. Critical third-party tools (think fraud scoring, caller authentication, conversational AI, Interactive Voice Response, and Natural Language Processing) highlight why BYOC gives you ultimate control over your composable CX stack.
4. A direct line to support
During a disruption, BYOC puts you as close to the source as possible—not multiple hops and delegators in between you and your voice provider.
BYOC gives you full transparency into your contact center’s network operations to prepare for any storms ahead, whereas bundling your telephony and contact center may put more distance between you and your toll-free provider. Because of this, many enterprises purchase telecom directly from the carrier for more visibility into network operations, regulatory insight, and quicker time to resolution when things go awry.
When critical high-volume numbers are being impacted by network outages, a direct relationship with the carrier means a quicker time to resolution and more operational uptime for happier customers.
5. Global scale
Today’s contact centers have an intrinsic need for scalability. Whether you’re managing seasonal spikes in call volume, handling an influx of customer complaints, or expanding geographically, you need a setup that responds to changes in real-time. On-prem, legacy environments struggle to keep up with rapid change. IT leaders could easily swap stories over the headaches caused by clunky, outdated infrastructure.
With BYOC, you can 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.
6. Vendor consolidation
You don’t have to BYOC with two, five, or ten toll-free providers to avoid being single-threaded or mitigate downtime. Instead of managing many different vendors to avoid toll-free downtime, you can eliminate points of failure with a 5X redundant network.
If an outage occurs on one thread, your carrier can automatically reroute your toll-free traffic for reliable service (and happier customers).
Migrate smoother with BYOC
If your contact center is already in the cloud, good news—you’ve taken a huge step towards innovation. Bring a good carrier, and they can take you anywhere.
