Why do Carriers fail at UCaaS?
The basics: Thanks to national voice market regulation, voice margin levels remain very sound in most markets and UCaaS has grown into a highly reliable and economical technology. So, “why is it, that so few carriers succeed at UCaaS?”, I hear you ask. Let’s start by identifying some simple elements that can signal disaster down the road:
UCaaS is not an island
UCaaS is highly dependent on many elements and technologies coming together in perfect harmony. Let’s take the last mile IP network component as an example. Bad quality or lack of reliability will have major impact on customer satisfaction. No point in having the best tech available in your UCaaS cloud if your customer cannot reach it. UCaaS is as strong as its weakest component.
UCaaS touches every department in the business
Ignoring this crucial fact, and not engaging from the start of the project with all the internal and external departments, spells guaranteed trouble for the project down the road.
Setting up UCaaS is resource intensive
For any UCaaS deployment to succeed it requires:
1. Full buy-in from senior management
2. A strong project sponsor
3. A UCaaS hero
UCaaS requires vision and knowledge
Carriers looking at launching themselves into UCaaS need to identify their UCaaS hero, an experienced business case leader that has both the experience and skills to lead the project to success.
Determine your UCaaS Hero
In the same way a good movie script relies on at least one hero to bring it to success, UCaaS success also highly depends on its hero(es). During the rollout of the UCaaS project, many strategic, technology and product family design decisions will need to be made.
As such, it is almost imperative that both the project sponsor and the project leader have a high-level understanding of the full solution picture. One of the most common early project mistakes, is to appoint a product manager at the helm of the UCaaS wheel.
Product managers will plot strategy, manage product releases, be responsible for ideation and prioritise features, right? Agreed, the above is very true, and the value of a good product manager is undeniable in the success cycle of any product. So, why shouldn’t we assign a product manager then as the hero? To answer this question, we need to look closer at the underlying features and dependencies of UCaaS as a technology.
UCaaS’ success is determined by the sum of the quality of its underlying technology components: last mile connection, phone hardware, UCaaS core routing, interconnect quality and many other crucial elements. Many of these crucial building blocks are spread over various product managers and technology departments. The skillsets required to successfully deploy UCaaS stretch well beyond those listed in a single product manager’s job description.
Modern UCaaS solutions allow carriers to invent and roll-out an almost unlimited number of voice and value-added service products. Many of today’s UCaaS product rely heavily on IMS based protocols and standards, and as such the mobile/fixed product lines are becoming more and more intertwined.
UCaaS clouds are more creation environments than anything else.
Every UCaaS deployment should be focused on catering for the widest range of voice and valuead-ded service combinations.
A well designed UCaaS solution provides an almost infinite amount of product revenue possibilities.
Unfortunately, too many carriers are satisfied with rolling out a vanilla cream UCaaS version based on the typical vendor’s pitched Bronze, Silver and Gold cus-tomer profiles at x cost / month. Successful carriers all have one element in common, they stepped off the vendor path and added their own special ingredient. By doing so, they respond to true customer needs in a unique way which sets them apart from the crowd.
Let’s take one step back. Before considering any technology or vendor, several questions need to be asked. For example: What does the local market look like?
The answer to this question will take us on a journey of analysing crucial data that resides at both the macro- and microeconomic level. This information is then combined with elements like historical customer spend, competitor analysis and customer needs, wants and budget.
Time and research are the base ingredients of any sound business case. Some carriers might argue that when you build it, they will come. So far reality has always found a way of catching up, often with quite dramatic results.
Independent of the size of the carrier, building out a UCaaS cloud is a prime example of learning to walk before you run. Not adhering to these basic rules can spell disaster down the line.
Detailed platform and product acceptance testing of all elements is essential. Recovering from multiday +1 million phone outage is hard, if not near impossible.
Often pressurised by the sales teams, some carriers make the mistake of pushing the envelope too far, too soon. Large deployments with exotic feature sets and call routing complexity, easily pushes a project into negative margin territory or pushes out the customer. The ‘Golden Rule’ is that the more telephony extensions a project contains, the higher the risk of running into unknowns, both from a customer requirement and telephony service performance level.
Rolling out large accounts, is by definition a unique custom job that requires a dedicated team to capture and provision the exact customer requirements.
As such, large projects are hard to scale up and consume vast amounts of the scarce UC resources.
The logical choice forward then would seem to be, small and medium enterprise customers, where feature sets are relatively simple, and provisioning can be fully automated.
Unfortunately, things are not that simple, the SMB market is much more sensitive to pricing due to the many traditional vendors already competing in this segment. Traditional PBX vendors can rely on a vast network of resellers and distributors who have honed this business into a true art.
The global UCaaS market is a multi-billion-dollar market, there for all to take, but mastering it will take some special ingredients.
In my next article in the series we will focus on the product design and commercial side of UCaaS.
