If you got a room full of CTO’s and asked them what keeps them awake, what they’re crying out for and what they need from a communication platform, what do you think they’d say?
At concept stage of Upwire, we did exactly that and here’s what they came back with.
An easy way to stage proof of concept testing.
Too often CTO’s are forced into making infrastructure and systems decisions based on questionable business case inputs. Usually its assumption after assumption. And for some reason, we usually question data but let assumptions sail through.
In a perfect world, CTO’s can run proof of concept (PoC) testing that exactly mirrors the real-life implementation. That way you can sure up your business case inputs before proceeding to integration and deployment.
For example, when weighing up a new IVR with voice biometric authentication, you’ll want to know average call time, proportion of calls transferred and authentication success rates before deploying.
With Upwire, because the setup of the communication workflow is so quick and tailorable, you can run your PoC testing using the exact IVR that you’d be deploying.
Now your business case inputs are ACTUAL performance, not just assumptions. And it’s a dead simple question as to whether you proceed to integration with your CRM.
A perfect PoC.
Usage based pricing
CTO’s hate large infrastructure investments, especially in platforms that have a limited expected shelf life. It can be a long, expensive process because racks of infrastructure need to be procured, installed and maintained to deliver the required functionality. Their preference for a cloud-based platform with usage only pricing was unanimous.
For startups and fast-growing companies, this is not just a nice to have.
As one startup Financial Officer put it: “I need the benefits to be realized as the cost is incurred, I don’t have the luxury of being able to recoup these costs over the next 10 years.”
Scalability
While we’re on the benefits of cloud-based platforms, this is the CTOs favourite – scalability. Especially when it comes to communication platforms.
With fixed in-house infrastructure, CTOs can’t win. They’re either overspent financing redundant capacity, or they aren’t building to meet business demand.
Michael Giresi, CTO of Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, summed it up: “The architecture that we have… it can’t scale, it doesn’t meet expectations and it has to be more or less completely redone with data and guests being at the absolute heart of it.”
It’s a completely unwinnable battle for CTOs, unless their communication platform is cloud-based.
Multi-channel communications on one platform.
It’s no accident that Upwire features voice, SMS and email capabilities on the one platform.
When we sat down with various IT managers they echoed each other on this point – we have too many suppliers, and too many integrations.
It makes IT infrastructure too complex, and vendor management too time consuming.
Combining all three major communication channels on one platform brings several benefits:
- Simplified vendor management including billing, support and security standards.
- Vastly simplified IT architecture with just one integration required to Upwire.
- More effective executions with the ability to easily use multiple channels in one automated communication workflow.
Very little reliance on IT developers.
Developers are expensive and their numbers limited. CTO’s constantly worry about attracting and retaining good ones, to the point where some advocate no longer requiring arduous qualifications for theirs.
CTO’s are constantly looking for ways to remove the need for IT developers from day-to-day running of IT infrastructure so they can focus on the transformational projects that will lead to a sustained competitive advantage.
It’s not about doing away with IT developers. As Richard Lumb, CEO of financial services at Accenture notes, automation did away with 17,000 jobs at their firm last year. But no one lost their job. “Automation… actually has eliminated more menial work and boosted productivity for staff”
With Upwire, we wanted a communication platform that anyone could use. It could be a product manager, marketing manager, or operations manager. And they could make changes to existing workflows themselves within minutes.
Whether it’s an automated phone poll, SMS lead generation campaign, or IVR with SMS confirmations, you can do it with Upwire without any specialist IT skills.
If integrating into your own CRM, accounting or other internal system, the IT dependency is limited to the API integration – once. Ever. From that point you can change the communication sequence and content without any coding at all.
Easy integration
Legacy IT stacks are a bugbear of all CTOs. Costly to maintain, inflexible and too often built as closed systems.
Given this, any new platform needs to be the polar opposite. It doesn’t stop integration on the company-side coming up against constraints and challenges.
But if the new platform is built with integration at the centre of its design, it makes life a whole lot easier.
That’s why Upwire uses REST APIs. They’re the simplest, most reliable way to system-trigger new communication workflows or send customer inputs into company systems.
Choose wisely to avoid building ‘tomorrow’s legacy IT stack’
It’s a favorite pastime of CTO’s to blame the ‘legacy stack’ for any number of things (totally justified 95% of the time!).
But what you don’t want to do is add to the problem with ill-advised decisions on new vendors and communication platforms.
These decisions are the ‘big bets’ of the CTO and getting them right means reaping the rewards for years. Get them wrong and you’ll doom your company to years and years of needless maintenance, inflexibility and integration issues.
When creating Upwire we deliberately canvassed CTO’s opinions to design a platform that was easy for a CTO to choose, test and launch. From its ability to run real-world PoC testing, it’s usage only pricing, to its infinite scalability, it’s the communication platform built for CTOs.
To get a demo of the communication platform built for CTOs contact us.
