One of the topics I’ve been talking with customers and prospects about lately is innovation. Usually, when people discuss VoIP and UC innovation, they think of the highly visible, cool new end-user products and features. This is what I refer to as, “above-ground innovation”. But above-ground innovation is only half of what we focus on when it comes to innovation at Alianza. The other kind of innovation is what I call “below-ground innovation” and it’s all about less visible supporting services and solutions that make service providers more efficient and accelerate revenue.
Our Customer Success team likes to call it service enablement. Addressing both above-ground and below-ground innovation is part of what makes Alianza not just a provider of killer products, but also a partner than powers solutions that helps our customers scale and succeed with our products.
Above-Ground Innovation
This is where we focus on new features or products that our customers can use to win and retain customers and ultimately drive revenue growth for a cloud communications portfolio.
This could be about adding new capabilities (e.g., robocall blocking) to home phone or launching an entirely new product (e.g., SMS chatbots) for existing and new business customers. Sometimes it’s about adding value and enhancing our current products and services, and other it’s about helping our customers expand into new markets and new revenue opportunities.
Our focus on above-ground product and feature innovation for CSPs is all about:
- Fast response to our customer requests
- Continuous delivery of innovative improvements
- Easy to deploy features for our customers and their end users (see SaaS: Freedom from Product Release Tyranny)
- Extend and embed communications into third-party apps
We are investing more in that education so our customers can take our new features and help their end users more quickly understand, adopt, and use those features. We accelerate time to market for new products.
Below-Ground Innovation
This is where we focus our innovation on making it easier to sign up, activate and support end users of cloud communications. We deliver operational simplicity for our customers.
Our focus on below-ground service enablement for CSPs is all about:
- Powerful, intuitive portals for account creation, activation, and troubleshooting
- Workflow automation and flow-through provisioning
- APIs for integration with back-office systems and carriers
- Device management
- Integrated fraud and network protection
- Reporting, monitoring and alerting
- Education and enablement
Here we remove operational friction and accelerate time-to-revenue. This innovation boosts margins and directly impacts the customer experience. Our solution reduces the total cost of ownership of cloud communications delivery and we help create revenue faster.
Continued Investment on Both
Our customers will continue to ask us to invest in innovation on these two fronts so they can win more and scale easily. Scaling the success of new products and features requires that below-ground work. This is what radically improving cloud communications is all about. This is how our customers have sustained success in VoIP and UC. We are passionate about enabling that success.
Can We Help You?
If you are a service provider with a traditional softswitch voice network infrastructure, we’d love to show you how you can enjoy the benefits of our dual focus on innovation. Let’s talk!
