Optimising the customer experience is one of organisations’ key concerns, and they often focus on improving and simplifying operational processes. But they sometimes forget to investigate an important element that underpins the quality of customer interactions: the reliability and availability of their business communications platform.
It’s essential to ensure that your system is reliable. A few minutes of downtime can have major repercussions, including missed calls, interrupted conversations, disappointed customers and a potential loss of revenue. To avoid these problems, businesses must be able to depend on a reliable and accessible communications platform. In this video, Nicolas Erhlacher, AVP Professional Services and Sales EMEA, explains why cloud solutions provide an effective response, but also describes the commitments that companies have a right to expect from their UCaaS provider.
Are cloud guarantees enough?
Most businesses have moved to the cloud to reduce the maintenance and support charges for their infrastructure. The cloud gives them unparalleled power, security and reliability. This is because the providers of cloud solutions pool their technical and human resources to provide capabilities that would be too expensive for companies that do not specialise in the field to maintain themselves. These providers make reliable infrastructure and security measures that have been tried and tested available to their customers .
The advantages of a single provider in guaranteeing maximum availability
When a UCaaS provider has a well-designed architecture and several data centres, another data centre can take over to avoid an interruption to the service. This is the case with RingCentral, which has a redundant architecture and more than 30 data centres worldwide. This guarantees service continuity and allows you to do business 24/7 wherever you are located.
Another factor to take into consideration when evaluating the reliability of a communications system is its ability to support spikes in activity. The RingCentral platform manages hundreds of thousands of users simultaneously and it is designed to support four times as many.
It is also important to be aware that possible service interruptions may be due to distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) cyber attacks. Hackers often find an easily accessible entry point in communications platforms where they can launch their malicious attacks. The reliability of communications systems also depends on the provider’s certifications, which confirm its compliance with the most stringent international IT security and data protection regulations. At RingCentral, our platform is certified to a wide range of the most demanding standards, including IPSOS 27001, SOC2, GDPR and C5. It is also possible to request end-to-end encryption of video conferences, phone calls and messaging.
Complete transparency with RingCentral
At RingCentral, we have total confidence in our infrastructure and we have decided to be fully transparent about the performance of our platform. From now on, we will have a web page showing our uptime services worldwide over different periods.
In the last 12 months, for example, our phone and video services have been available 99.9999% of the time. We are committed to the famous five 9s (99.999%), but we often go even further. At any time, you can check on the status of our services across the three regions and on all the channels.
Have you missed the previous episodes?
Watch Bryan’s advice on how to integrate your phone system with Microsoft Teams.
Originally published Nov 22, 2023
