More trust yields better outcomes

How Bandwidth Earns Our Customers’ Trust

A message from Ryan Henley, Chief Customer Officer

Customers are trusting Bandwidth exclusively to power their platform’s communications needs.

What’s Trust Got to Do With It?

Our customers deploy applications that allow businesses, schools, governments, and individuals to communicate. Those communications take many forms: a conference call with colleagues, a 911 call to emergency services, a call to mom, a text message appointment reminder, and dozens of others.  If those communications don’t work, the application provider fails in the eyes of those who matter most…their end-users. Even the best software can’t make up for poor connectivity. It’s imperative that providers select a communications partner that they trust to deliver a reliable, high-quality, service-oriented experience.

Diversify or Consolidate?

Because of this imperative, customers typically choose one of two strategies in selecting a provider:

1. Diversify: Having several providers allows some level of risk mitigation. If one provider fails, you can theoretically shift to the other. It also allows for easy price comparison shopping. This is a classic procurement strategy, but it can actually create significant risk and increase total cost of ownership. 
   
2. Consolidate: Having a single service partner eliminates complexity, lowers risk, and results in a lower total cost of ownership. Multiple vendors mean multiple APIs, multiple support channels, and multiple service teams with a variety of experience and expertise.  In short, more complexity = more risk. 
   
   Also, differing capabilities across vendors result in either (a) an inconsistent product offering for your customer (eg. You: “We can do X with that telephone number, but I can’t do it with Y telephone number b/c it’s powered by a different provider.” Customer: “WTH!”) or (b) dumbing your product down to the lowest-common-denominator vendor. Finally, consolidating spend with a single vendor maximizes your price negotiating power. 

Companies across the nation are recognizing that consolidation is the right path forward, placing their trust in Bandwidth as their exclusive provider for voice, messaging, and 911 communications.

Ultimately, that decision comes down to one thing: Trust.

How I Think About Trust

There’s a great analogy about trust made popular by Brene Brown in her “Dare to Lead” book. She likens trust to a jar of marbles, where individual acts of kindness and service add marbles to the jar. Slowly over time, the marbles fill the jar. Trust is built in the same way: over time, and based on acts of service.

As I watch customers make the decision to transition onto the Bandwidth platform, I see them going through the process of building trust in us.  

During the sales process, we share the great work our product and technology teams do to deliver innovative solutions, our track record of high network availability and quality, and the great service ratings and comments we receive from customers. All these things drop a few marbles into the trust jar. 

Those first few marbles convince customers to take the journey with us, but it’s the other things we do that separate us from other vendors and help us earn their full trust. 

More trust is earned through shared experience, in good times and in bad, as the relationship matures. I see our service teams building this trust every day. Here’s how they do it:

Listen — Understanding what makes a customer successful is absolutely essential. Bandwidth has a full toolkit of capabilities that we can use to make our customers successful, so we spend a lot of time upfront listening to our customers. If we don’t first seek to understand our customers’ objectives, we may miss an opportunity to recommend the right tool. That time spent learning their business is why our customers trust we have their business’s best interest at heart. 

Care — Our Bandwidth principles are centered around the core idea that we “Work for and love the success of others.” That core idea is fundamentally about caring. It means that we care about our customers’ success, and we tie that success to our own. Ultimately, we (our customers and Bandwidth) will either succeed (or fail) together.

Commit — This is where the rubber meets the road. How we serve our customers and the actions we take on their behalf ultimately dictate the trust they have in us. As relationships mature, there will be good times and bad. We recognize and empower our people to take the actions necessary, even when it’s hard. Listening and caring are great, but if they aren’t followed with definitive action, they are meaningless.

We take care of the network, so you can focus on your customers

We’re fortunate to have quite a few customers who’ve trusted us with their entire communications business. It’s an awesome responsibility and one that we do not take lightly.

By trusting us completely, customers are empowered to:

Focus — consolidating communications with Bandwidth allows these customers to focus on what matters most: their customers and their applications.

Automate — using our robust API suite, customers are automating everything possible, including voice calls, text messaging, new number acquisition, number porting, and feature management.

Reduce Facilities-based Costs — customers with legacy PSTN infrastructure are going all-in with Bandwidth and decommissioning their old costly PSTN infrastructure.

Maximize Quality — Bandwidth powers the Gartner UCaaS Magic Quadrant. Chances are, if your customer is calling another business, Bandwidth is likely powering that call end-to-end. And if we’re not, that call is only one IP-enabled hop away from the largest wireless and wireline carriers in the nation. Short (or no) hops = Higher quality calls.

Reduce Operating Expenses — consolidating communications with Bandwidth allows customers to gain the maximum economies of scale possible based on their total communications spend versus spreading spend across multiple providers.