Channel Fallback & Routiing

The moment you discover a blind spot in your communication setup is never a good one. It is not during the vendor evaluation, not during the pilot, not in the QBR where everything looks fine on a slide. It is in production, at scale, when a payment reminder fails to reach 40,000 users because the channel you built for doesn't work on feature phones. When a field agent dispatch system goes silent because the network in that region doesn't support data. When a loan repayment sequence breaks because mobile money confirmation was never part of the original design.

Most communication systems look simple from the outside. A company sends messages, triggers reminders, or responds to customers on SMS, WhatsApp, Viber, or whatever channel is popular in that region. The experience looks straightforward. The reality beneath it is anything but.