Many of our customers have asked us what to look for in a cloud communications platform. Many of you are looking to start your business or are looking for a new platform to add to your portfolio, making an informed decision is critical. You need to make sure you’re choosing a solution that is best suited for your business not only right now, but also well into the future.
Making this decision is hard, and there are a lot of options. To help you get to the bottom of it and choose the cloud communications platform that will best fit your business, here are 3 things to consider as you navigate the crowded landscape of options.
Redundancy
Staying up and running 24/7/365 is more important than ever. Let’s be real — all it takes is one major outage for you to lose customers and hurt your reputation. Nowadays, seemingly every cloud communications provider claims redundancy, but the reality is much different. Redundancy doesn’t necessarily mean resiliency because not all redundancies are created equal. Most redundancy setups utilized today are hot standbys, which are not as resilient as the second type of setup called distributed systems. Become familiar with the difference so you can determine if the solutions you’re vetting are truly redundant or not. Check out this article for more information.
Customer Experience and Beautiful Interfaces
An enjoyable customer experience is the single biggest contributor to customer loyalty. It creates “sticky” customers who renew their contracts term after term, which keeps your attrition rate low and enables your business to continuously expand. In your search, make sure the solution you choose offers all of the features and functionality your customers need, but also look for a platform that can be customized to your customers’ needs. Customizing your offering will enable you to offer the ideal customer experience and will help your customers get their jobs done more quickly and efficiently, which means bonus points for you and increased retention for your customers.Ask yourself – which solution will enable me to help my customers do business better, more easily, and more efficiently?
Scalability
Like redundancy, scalability is another buzzword that pretty much every mainstream communications provider uses to describe their product, and for good reason. As your bring in more customers and seats, your platform needs to be able to easily grow along with your business. However, just because it is said that a solution CAN scale, doesn’t mean it can do so easily and as needed. As you’re looking at various solutions, make sure you dig into how quickly and easily each will actually scale. You want to be able to fulfill the number of seats you sell seamlessly and some solutions make that less of a hassle and less time consuming than others.
The good news is that you have options. The not so good news is that many of those options won’t give you everything you need to optimize business success for both you AND your customers. Doing your due diligence and taking the above three aspects into consideration in your search will help set your business up for success. While you’re at it, make sure you check out 2600Hz’s cloud communication solution, KAZOO — it might just be exactly what you need .