Four benefits of a vendor agnostic communications or collaboration solution

How selecting a vendor agnostic solution can support your organization’s communications and collaboration strategy.

As organizations navigate digital transformation, they’re faced with a variety of challenges. Many need to rapidly transition to the cloud. They also require the ability to innovate flexibly.

Despite these challenges, digital transformation offers huge benefits. Digital transformation allows organizations to adapt and pivot quickly, deliver omni-channel communications, streamline internal communications and collaboration, boost productivity, and improve customer experience. The challenge comes with finding communications and collaboration providers that meet the organization’s unique needs.

Many UCaaS (unified communications as a service) and CCaaS (contact center as a service) providers offer all-in-one, full stack bundles. These bundles limit the ability for organizations to customize their solution with the voice, features, services, and applications that they require to stay competitive. Organizations that want the flexibility to customize their UCaaS or CCaaS platforms may benefit from using a vendor agnostic solution.

What is a vendor agnostic solution?

In short, a vendor agnostic solution allows organizations to unbundle their solution. Sometimes referred to as vendor neutral solution, a vendor agnostic solution means that the solution is open to all viable and established solutions. In the realm of communications, that means that when you choose a vendor agnostic UCaaS or CCaaS, you can bring your own carrier (BYOC) communications workflow automation (CWA) provider, or other solution to customize your UCaaS or CCaaS solution. With a vendor agnostic solution, you will benefit from a variety of options that can best support your organization.

What are the benefits of a vendor agnostic solution?

For many organizations unbundling platforms can deliver the best of both worlds. They’re able to hold onto the features and functionality that they like and need from their voice carrier, layer on powerful CWA features and optimizations, while taking advantage of the power of their UCaaS or CCaaS platform. Using a vendor agnostic solution allows organizations to truly customize their solution to their unique needs. In short, they benefit from:

1. Flexibility

When organizations choose a vendor agnostic solution, they can choose whatever solution is ideal for them. Instead of being forced to use their provider’s voice solution or automation features, they can bring the platforms that best support their business requirements.

For example, the organization can select the carrier of their choice, with the services, features, applications, pricing and more that will help them stay nimble and competitive. By managing their platforms independently, they keep the flexibility needed to control their communications while still maintaining a seamless end-user experience.

2. Future-proof communications

The business world continues to rapidly shift in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Organizations can ensure that they can keep pace by future-proofing their communications. Future-proofing is a two-part effort, including reliability and omni-channel communications.

Reliability

Communications are at the center of any organization’s success and when they fail it can be difficult to recover. Selecting a vendor agnostic solution means that an organization can pair their solution with voice and CWA platforms that guarantee 99.999% reliability, deliver enterprise-quality 24/7/365 support, and offer advanced voice capabilities like applications to support omni-channel communications. Selecting a vendor with 99.999% reliability means that when the unexpected occurs, like severe weather or an outage, the organization’s communications will failover to another location, so that their communications and operations stay up and running.

Omnichannel communications

Not only does every individual prefer a different method of communication, but that preference also shifts as the world changes. Selecting a vendor agnostic solution means that organizations can layer on omni-channel communications and automation applications so that they can reach out to their audience across several communications channels. The multi-pronged approach means that audience members can engage on their preferred channel and that organizations can use automation to engage many times to create a comprehensive experience.

3. Lower cost

When organizations select a bundled, full-stack solution, they’re forced to pick the package that comes closest to their needs, from a limited number of options, regardless of the price. This means that organizations are paying for features they may not want, use, or need, that they aren’t able to negotiate on. Selecting a vendor agnostic solution means that the organization can choose the solutions that truly support their unique needs and that they can keep budget top of mind.

Using a vendor agnostic solution also allows organizations to keep their existing voice contracts, instead of being forced to cancel them and incur early termination fees when moving over to a bundled solution. Costs can also be saved by avoiding large, expensive porting projects.

4. Unbiased, white-glove support

Every organization needs different levels of support. When organizations select a vendor agnostic solution, they can choose to layer on solutions with the support they require to be successful. As opposed to receiving low-level support that is bundled into their solution, they can choose a provider that guarantees 99.999% reliability, delivers enterprise-quality 24/7/365 support, and more.

Vendor agnostic solutions, BYOC, and CWA

When using a vendor agnostic communications or collaboration solution, the usage varies. When organizations use a vendor agnostic solution and bring their own voice carrier and automation applications, they typically use one of the following approaches to excel:

1. Direct SIP trunking: Organizations that use Direct SIP trunking route their voice traffic directly to their UCaaS or CCaaS provider. Dynamic failover routing is used to redirect traffic to alternative destinations to support disaster recovery.
2. Hybrid model: Organizations that use a hybrid model route voice traffic to a hosted provider in addition to separate SIP connections to the enterprise premise. This allows the organization to take advantage of both cloud and on-premise solutions.
3. Adding on CWA: CWA is a solution that can be added or adjusted in minutes, allowing organizations to build and deliver great communications experiences, immediately, without requiring developer resources. Organizations that add CWA layer on communications applications in front of the SIP infrastructure and/or the hosted provider to automate workflows, processes, and operations, so that they deliver best-in-class service and communications.

The result

Selecting a vendor agnostic solution allows organizations to independently manage all aspects of their UCaaS and CCaaS solution, allowing them to easily transition to the cloud and partake in digital transformation. This allows them to fully customize their approach and ensure that the solution is tailored to their specific business requirements. A vendor agnostic solution ensures that organizations can innovate flexibly in the cloud, future-proof their communications, stay cost-efficient, and select best-in-class support.

Are you interested in using a vendor agnostic solution, BYOC, CWA, or all three? We can help. Contact IntelePeer today to learn more.