The COVID-19 pandemic forced businesses to move many customer interactions into remote, mobile, and virtual channels — a process that was already underway, but that has accelerated in the last year. Many businesses now use SMS messaging, which gives companies a direct, automated, scalable, and cost-effective way to reach mobile customers in real time.
Businesses frequently automate voice interactions along with SMS. In addition to providing more personalized service than text messaging, voice can act as a backup communications channel, providing services if anything goes wrong with SMS.
That notion of having a backup is a good one. In addition to having a backup channel, you should also have a backup communication platform — a second SMS and voice provider, to ensure that your mission-critical communications channels stay up and running.
Network outages happen, and when they do, you want to be sure that your customers can still receive messages and critical information, and can access their accounts using two-factor authentication and one-time passwords — a common use case for SMS.
Multicloud CPaaS
Many organizations add fault tolerance to their IaaS and PaaS platforms by using multiple providers. In a report based on the 451 Research Voice of the Enterprise (VOTE) survey, 451 Senior Analyst Raul Castanon says, “As mainstream enterprise adoption continues to grow, we expect CPaaS will mirror key trends driving the evolution of the larger IaaS/PaaS market.” In a joint webinar with Plivo he reinforced that notion, saying, “CPaaS remains a fragmented space, highlighting the complexities in delivering real-time communications. Multicloud CPaaS can address challenges related to resiliency, scalability, coverage, and regulation.”
A multivendor approach reduces the risk of you going silent on your customers, but it has other benefits as well. Chief among them is cost savings. A multivendor approach lets you lower your total cost of ownership by using the provider that has the best quality and price in specific countries, regions, and networks.
What to look for
As you consider adding a second CPaaS platform to your infrastructure, you should consider two key factors: availability and support.
Availability and uptime
Any network platform can encounter unplanned outages. When that happens with a cloud communications platform, users can fail to receive important information such as account alerts, delivery notifications, and appointment reminders. Worse, they can experience issues with sign-in workflows. If someone doesn’t retrieve a text message for 2FA, they can’t access the resources they need on your systems.
Plivo promises 99.99% uptime. In practice we generally do better than that — check our status page for proof. That enables us to deliver more than a billion transactions every month. Any CPaaS provider should offer you service-level agreements (SLA) with similar uptime guarantees. If you have both a primary and a secondary CPaaS provider with those kinds of SLAs, chances are you’ll never lose touch with your customers.
Customer support
When downtime happens, as it inevitably does, you need to be able to get in touch with your provider to diagnose the issue and get it solved, whether it stems from your application, the CPaaS platform, or a carrier network. You want a partner that claims responsibility for getting you back in service, regardless of where the issue arose. You want to work with an organization that understands the unique telco laws and regulations in each country and works with carrier networks.
That’s a difficult task for some CPaaS providers that lack direct connections with carriers. Problem resolution takes a lot longer when your provider lacks visibility into the network. Other providers have limited support hours, or their support staff is unreachable unless you’re a top-tier enterprise customer.
Plivo is known for being one of the few providers that can offer technical help as needed on a per-customer basis. Customers can talk with solution engineers for guidance on complex integrations for fast issue resolution.
Plivo works directly with in-country Tier 1 carriers with direct interconnectivity to local telecom network operators in more than 100 countries. We have network engineers standing by 24/7 in network operations centers (NOC) in Austin, Texas, and Bengaluru, India, who can diagnose and solve problems quickly and get you back online.
These relationships enable our customers to make calls and send SMS messages to every country in the world without routing dilution or route blending. We offer the best possible connections worldwide, so you aren’t paying for undelivered messages.
Second to none
If you’re considering Plivo as a second CPaaS, we make it easy for you to get started. We have solution templates for several use cases, clear getting-started documentation, and flexible pay-as-you-go pricing for both SMS and Voice. (You’ll notice our rates are lower than those of most of our competitors.)
Businesses need to stay close to customers, prospects, and partners. Adding automated SMS and voice communications to their portfolio through a cloud communications platform lets businesses deliver the kinds of experiences their customers expect — and having a second platform to fall back on and spread the load lets them keep delivering even when things go wrong.
See for yourself — sign up for a free trial today.
