CPaaS/CCaaS platform evaluation checklist
Use this rubric to run a vendor selection on any communications platform without leaving the docs. Each of the ten sections below names the question to ask, the claim to test, and the exact Orbit surface that answers it — open the links as you go and score the vendor per section. The full narrative follow-up lives on the blog; the checklist itself stands on its own here.When to use this rubric
- Shortlist construction. Run the same ten sections against every candidate vendor before you commit a demo day. A consistent rubric keeps the comparison honest — section 6 (billing arithmetic) usually eliminates half the field on its own.
- RFP questionnaires. Paste each section’s question set into your RFP and require a page-reference rather than a yes/no. Vendors that answer with marketing copy fail; vendors that answer with a public doc or rate card pass.
- Scoring cadence. Score one section at a time, in order, on a 0–2 scale (0 = fails, 1 = partial, 2 = passes with public evidence). Ten sections at twenty points total; anything under fourteen is not worth a proof-of-concept. Re-score the surviving vendors with your own sandbox traffic before signature.
How to score any communications platform
1. Channel coverage
Question: Does every channel you will touch — SMS, MMS, WhatsApp, RCS, email, voice, video, fax — run on one account and one wallet, or will you stitch providers together per channel? Check on Orbit: The channel tree ships each channel as a first-class surface on the shared wallet. Verify the ones you need: SMS, MMS, WhatsApp, RCS, voice, email, video, fax. A channel that answers “we integrate with a partner for that” scores 1 at best — integration means a second bill, a second credential, and a second delivery-report format.2. AI-agent surface
Question: Do AI agents run natively on the same calls and messages as your human agents, with per-action cost visible on the same account? Check on Orbit: The agents overview covers the full lifecycle — create, ground, guardrail, evaluate, and ship agents that take voice calls and message conversations natively. If a vendor’s agent is a bolt-on product with a separate invoice, handoff and stop-and-start-your-conversation-again gaps follow. See the agent implementation guide for what a native surface looks like in the build.3. Contact-center surface
Question: Can you build routing, QA coaching, and the agent desktop on the platform today, rather than deferring it to a migration project after go-live? Check on Orbit: The CCaaS surface covers the inbox coaching and QA workflows, SLA escalation policies, and a routing model you can exercise in the sandbox before you pick a plan. Run the check during evaluation, not after signature.4. CDP surface
Question: Is the customer data platform native — one profile, one consent record, one conversation history per contact — or a CRM connector you would operate yourself? Check on Orbit: The CDP accounts concept defines the unified profile that messaging, voice, and agents all read from. A “CDP” that is actually a connector means you buy the storage and pay for the sync failures. Confirm the profile is the same record the channel delivers on.5. Tenant-owned compliance controls
Question: Are compliance controls — consent, quiet hours, send gates, evidence export — tenant-owned and configurable by you, or hard-coded defaults you cannot inspect? Check on Orbit: Compliance is a tenant-owned surface, not a vendor’s promise. Review consent management and send gates, then confirm the evidence you would show an auditor exports through consent suppression export. Controls you cannot configure or audit score 0 — “we handle compliance for you” is not a control.6. Billing model arithmetic
Question: For your projected 24-month volume, what does the bill actually compute to — per-seat, per-message, per-minute, or a hybrid — and can you run that arithmetic yourself from a public rate card? Check on Orbit: Work the arithmetic on the rate cards page with your own volume mix. Compare the usage-based total against the per-seat quotes you collect here — per-seat models price your growth as headcount pain. If a vendor cannot give you a public number to multiply, their “custom pricing” is the answer: you will renegotiate annually, blind.7. Network ownership
Question: Whose network terminates the outbound traffic — the vendor’s own carrier infrastructure, or a resold upstream you cannot see? Check on Orbit: Orbit routes outbound voice and SMS over Devotel’s own wholesale softswitch; the carrier of record comparison shows what that claim means against aggregators. Network ownership decides who controls routing, delivery-report depth, and the pricing floor. A reseller passes the upstream’s margin and outages straight through to you.8. Pricing transparency
Question: Can you compute your bill from a public rate card without a sales call? Check on Orbit: The billing overview documents how the wallet, rate cards, and per-channel pricing compose — the arithmetic on the page is the arithmetic on the invoice. Score 2 only when you can predict the number yourself; score 0 when the answer is “talk to sales.”9. Trial access
Question: Can you get a real API key and run real traffic today, without a demo scheduled behind a form? Check on Orbit: Self-serve access is the answer. Follow the quickstart and work through the sandbox on your own tenant — the pre-launch checklist is the gauntlet every production tenant passes through, so a vendor whose trial skips it is hiding something the checklist would catch. A gated “demo environment” that requires three meetings is itself section evidence.10. Support tiers and status
Question: What support tier is included at your spend level, what is the response-time contract for each severity, and does the vendor publish live status history? Check on Orbit: Included tiers and the response-time contract are documented, and the status page is linkable and public. A vendor without a public status page, or whose incident history you cannot read, earns 0 here — you will be flying blind at your own next incident review.Scoring table
Copy these rows into your vendor spreadsheet. The Orbit column is filled in as the worked example; score each candidate against the same scale (0 = fails, 1 = partial, 2 = passes with public evidence).
Shortlist at ≥ 14/20; proof-of-concept at ≥ 17/20. Retake sections 1, 5, and 6 against your sandbox traffic before signature — those three decide the first-year cost more than the demo does.