satisfy their service requests without involving contact center agents, which is particularly important when a company's communication capabilities are offline. This network-based overlay lets businesses build call handling options or workflows that automate communications across multiple channels, empowering companies to send notifications, appointment reminders and payment requests to their customers on their preferred device even during an outage. These communications also provide self-service options, so customers can continue to engage with a business regardless of the status of the hosted provider. For example, customers can still view their account information or transaction history through AI-powered voice or SMS messaging without going through a live agent, who would be unavailable because the hosted provider is undergoing service issues.

When workflow automation pairs with a BYOC strategy, it supports disaster avoidance while simultaneously improving customer experience (CX), streamlining operations and communications quickly and easily. As described in the example above, customers can use self-service options to complete routine or simple tasks, freeing agents to focus on high-priority calls. Similarly, workflow automation lets agents focus on the more involved or complex interactions that require human-to-human communications. Take an insurance business, for instance: implementing communications workflow automation allows clients to activate their cards, access account information and make payments without ever talking to an agent. The customer is happy because they didn't need to speak with anyone, and the agent’s time is also better spent as they can deal with more pressing issues that require human intervention. The more processes a business can automate, the more efficient, streamlined and agile they will be, especially during unplanned downtime. Additionally, beyond giving people the freedom of self-service options, BYOC increases uptime and minimizes frustrated customers, consistently maintaining CX.  

No-code and low-code solutions

One efficient approach to enabling BYOC and communication workflow automations is through no-code or low-code solutions. A no-code failover treatment extends a customer’s call to a hosted provider. If there is no response, it will immediately divert the caller to a network-based announcement informing the customer of an outage affecting service and advising them to try calling later. A low-code option can provide the same outage announcement, yet this method adds value to that no-code treatment, as it permits the customer’s call to dynamically flow to an audio recording that lets the customer ask to get called back. This solution simultaneously captures the caller’s phone number, including the date and time they called, and then sends that information via API to the enterprise. When the system gets restored, traffic gets routed back automatically. Moreover, that company now has a list of the people who tried to reach them during the outage event, allowing agents to call back and fulfill a missed sales opportunity or address an unsolved request. 

Other use cases of no-code and low-code solutions include the ability to quickly build a workflow to automate outbound service notifications and add a pre-set message to advise customers in case of an emergency. Because of the minimal coding required to deploy these solutions, companies can swiftly adjust and update routing patterns, preventing revenue and productivity loss and maintaining a consistent CX across all locations. Furthermore, these solutions eliminate drawn-out development cycles, allowing businesses to resolve their pressing communication needs with few resources. From smart routing and easily configured automated messages to natural language processing and secure payment processing connectors, these no-code and low-code applications can integrate seamlessly with existing communication infrastructure while avoiding the typical rip-and-replace method. Most notably, these applications level the playing field for small businesses that usually cannot implement such complex communication applications the instant an outage occurs due to a lack of IT personnel or insufficient resources.  

BYOC and the cloud 

During COVID, everyone who wasn't there already migrated to the cloud; subsequently, enterprises reported a 51 percent increase in downtime. Organizations began to second-guess their decision. With BYOC and workflow automations that leverage no-code and low-code applications, however, the threat of an outage is much less severe. And for businesses upgrading from a legacy private branch exchange or unified communications environment to a cloud-based UCaaS or contact center, BYOC will add the greatest value to their new solutions. In addition to giving companies the agility to adapt quickly and provide the same level of service during downtime, BYOC goes beyond disaster avoidance, transforming flexibility in the cloud and allowing businesses to tailor their voice packages for their unique needs.