By: Peter Neal

Though Bring Your Own Carrier (or BYOC) is not a novel concept, it continues to grow in popularity as organizations of all sizes move to the cloud due to the explosion of cloud-based providers, including Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Cisco WebEx. For businesses with a hosted UCaaS (unified communications as a service), contact center solution or both, BYOC allows them to use their preferred voice carrier instead of the one their provider bundles with its communications platform. In essence, BYOC gives companies the freedom to choose the provider that best meets their specific needs regarding costs, reliability and services. While there are several reasons why organizations may want to explore a BYOC strategy, including a better customer experience through automation capabilities or the cost-saving benefits, one of the primary reason many companies should choose it is for disaster avoidance.

The risks of using one consolidated cloud vendor 

Most businesses might not consider BYOC as an aspect of their business continuity or disaster avoidance strategy; it is mistakenly assumed to only add value through the convenience of keeping one's preferred voice carrier. Communication solutions continue to grow in complexity, increasing the likelihood of these systems breaking due to the greater variety of variables. Businesses bundling voice with hosted UCaaS or contact center solutions from one cloud provider are at the mercy of the reliability of that hosted provider's uptime. By relying on a single-source topology, companies risk losing the ability to talk to their customers should their provider experience service issues or an unexpected disruption resulting from weather, construction or cyberattack. 

Depending on one consolidated vendor can be problematic, as demonstrated in late 2021 when apps, streaming services and Amazon itself relied on Amazon Web Services. AWS underwent server downtime, causing hundreds of digital services to experience technical problems for hours. The incidents didn't take incredibly long to resolve, but the reputation loss for each company using AWS was considerable. Without the power to communicate to customers, organizations face severe financial and reputational consequences. In fact, data from Gartner revealed that the cost of every minute of downtime is $5,600 in regulatory fines, lost productivity and reduced revenue. Outages can also cause indirect costs, including the loss of future customers and decreased ability to recruit skilled employees, which aren't as easily calculated. As trends like remote work and virtualization place greater importance on a business’s ability to maintain consistent communication with its customers, it is becoming increasingly more critical that brands have built-in agility through BYOC.

Keeping communications up and running  

The most valuable benefit of BYOC is that companies don't have to depend on a single host phone service and voice connectivity provider. With a BYOC solution in place, companies can bolster their resiliency and keep communications up and running by taking their contact center or hosted enterprise calls and directing them dynamically to alternative forms of treatment. By having a backup voice solution at the ready, customers can still achieve their goals even if most of the business's system is offline. A typical BYOC strategy offers dynamic failover routing, which redirects voice calls to other locations and direct SIP trunking, which routes traffic directly to the provider. In addition to being able to leverage different failover scenarios, BYOC also permits backup SIP trunk paths, cloud-based IVRs that enable self-service and call redirection choices and network-based audio messaging. Companies can even route calls to users’ smartphones with a BYOC strategy. And, once the hosted provider resolves their outage issue, BYOC helps businesses restore the original routing.

The advantages of having greater agility in the face of downtime are multifold. Industries like manufacturing budget for lost revenue, anticipating that downtime will inevitably occur. But by deploying voice redundancy at all levels of one’s communication strategy via BYOC, companies can boost uptime, save money and reduce expenses. Moreover, BYOC helps organizations establish the redundancy essential to keeping mission-critical voice communications operating, which is significant today as customers have become accustomed to twenty-four-seven support from leading brands. Indeed, people have become more demanding since the pandemic, preferring to perform communication tasks asynchronously; consumers don’t want to talk to a call center agent if it isn’t necessary. And while a BYOC approach is pivotal to disaster preparedness, businesses can make themselves even more resilient by combining it with workflow automation.  

Automation for business continuity and CX

BYOC allows an organization to layer communications workflow automation on existing voice and hosted UCaaS and contact center solutions. Customers can then