Selling Cloud Communications As A Service: 6 Solution Must-Haves

By Carlos Roman, Head of Global Partner Marketing, 8x8, Inc.

Communications is the lifeblood of any enterprise. In our bigger, better, faster culture, companies expect continuous, high-quality communications that seamlessly support business operations and enhance the overall customer experience. With so many critical business applications shifting to the cloud, doing the same with business communications makes perfect sense. What’s key for success is meeting enterprise requirements for reliability, quality, security, and reach.

According to IDC, the cloud portion of the worldwide Unified Communications & Collaboration market is expected to grow to $20 billion in 2019, with a five-year CAGR of 13.7 percent for the 2014–2019 timeframe. As quickly as cloud deployments continue to grow, so does the need for resellers waiting in the wings with the right expertise, products and services.

If you are selling cloud solutions today — or getting ready to make the shift from selling legacy, on premise solutions — helping companies move their communications to the cloud could be a good fit, particularly if you have roots selling business telephony and contact center solutions.

But first you want to do your due diligence to find a trusted solution (and vendor) that has proven results in transforming the way companies communicate. This is particularly important as some enterprises have been tainted by early, not-so-great experiences with consumer-based Voice over IP (VoIP) products, making them reluctant to consider a bigger cloud communications deployment.

To help you forge a smart reseller partnership, here are six elements of a cloud communications service that should not be overlooked:

1. Profitable and proven success: While it can be tempting to partner with a brand-new cloud provider, it’s wise to align with a vendor whose technology has weathered the test of time. Look for companies who are profitable on a consistent basis, and not just one quarter, so you can be confident the company and product will be around for the long haul. The last thing you want is to sell a new cloud solution to customers and have the cloud provider shut down operations.
2. Global reach: Communications should know no boundaries, whether your customer is an SMB with regional operations or a mammoth enterprise with offices around the world. You want to ensure voice communications placed or received at any location on the globe, from any type of device, have the same, consistent high quality as an internal call made to a coworker down the hall. Some hosted IP solutions route signaling data through the same data center regardless of where a call is located when the call is initiated. For example, if a U.S.-based employee traveling in Sydney, Australia makes a call to a business in Sydney, the call is routed back through the “home” data center in the U.S. first — a less than ideal routing process for real-time communications. Look for a solution that routes call data to the closest data center to the caller’s current location, while making automated, decisions to redirect based on current Internet and carrier network conditions.
3. High reliability and uptime: This may seem like an obvious requirement, but it’s imperative to ask about the vendor’s track record of reliability. What is the company’s average call flow processing time? What is the built-in failover plan in the event of a major disruption? How and when are maintenance services performed? What redundant servers, databases, and storage resources are in place to maximize uptime?
4. End-to-End Service Level Guarantees: Having an SLA gives your customers — and you — peace of mind as the customer knows what they’re getting and can trust you’ll make it happen. Ideally, you want an end-to-end SLA that covers both service availability and voice call quality. As a guideline, at 8x8, we offer an end-to-end SLA for both uptime and quality of voice over the public Internet, guaranteeing a voice-quality mean opinion score (MOS) of 3.5 or above.
5. Get third-party validation: How many times have you heard, “We are the world’s leading provider?” Every vendor proclaims to be the best of the best, but few have earned such credentials. Rather than taking such claims at face value, turn to third-party sources, such as analyst firms, for validation. Gartner's Magic Quadrant is a great resource to see how well technology providers are executing on their stated visions and performing within the market.
6. Insight into communications performance: Companies want customer feedback that goes well beyond calls to the help desk about voice quality — or lack thereof. By moving all communications activities to the cloud, data related to traffic trends, network and service performance, and call quality statistics can be mined to uncover opportunities to improve customer service and boosting customer satisfaction. Ask cloud vendors about capabilities for big data communications and analytics to provide visibility into: location and quality of services, endpoint device status, MOS call quality details, and detailed information for all direct inbound numbers.

Use these six criteria to choose a cloud communications provider that will give your customers a smarter way to communicate — connecting people, locations, and devices securely and reliably. By helping enterprises take advantage of all that cloud communications has to offer, you’ll unlock greater revenue opportunities.