Omnichannel is fast becoming the industry standard for effective communication strategies, however, most enterprises struggle to make omnichannel a practical reality due to the huge upfront and maintenance costs involved. Here’s how CPaaS helps brands deliver better customer engagement through omnichannel messaging more efficiently.
When was the last time you used a landline telephone to make an overseas call? Exactly – VoIP, Instant Messaging, video conferencing and chat have already transformed the consumer market, and the same is now true for enterprises as well. Marketing success today means reaching and responding to consumers where they are, on whatever device they’re using, in real time.
Omnichannel messaging is rapidly becoming the cornerstone for marketers and brands looking to deliver better customer experiences, increase brand visibility, and open up new channels for customer interaction. In fact, a new Aberdeen Group study states that companies with a strong omnichannel marketing strategy retained on average, 89% of their customers and witnessed a 9.5% year-on-year revenue growth.
There’s absolutely no doubt that it’s incredibly important for businesses to have a single platform that addresses all of their omnichannel communication or engagement needs. However, implementing a unified communication platform is an arduous task for the average business. After all, once you zero down on a set of viable engagement platforms, how do you then rope in support for the wide range of services that your customers have grown to expect? How do you manage and coordinate the messages sent across these platforms (voice, text, video) to deliver a consistent experience?
This is a problem area where brands get stuck. Stitching together disparate communications platforms such as voice, video, and text will mean pouring an inordinate amount of money, time and effort into building a solution that may or may not work. The issue is compounded by the fact that you also risk building siloed product-based structures that can’t adapt to ever-changing customer preferences.
This is where CPaaS steps in. CPaaS helps brands deliver seamless cross-platform communication through a single managed hub.
What is CPaaS?
When PaaS offers are specifically oriented toward supporting communication functionality, these are called communications PaaS, or cPaaS. In several cases, these platforms are integrated with special purpose communications infrastructure, while in other cases these operate on public IaaS offers. Increasingly, business application developers want to extend their applications with SMS, MMS, speech recognition, mobile browsing, two-factor authentication, intelligent assistants and other emerging options for fixed and mobile interactions. Additionally, enterprises are rethinking how they offer services, developing highly interactive automated customer and service experiences that allow them to compete in the emerging digital business and digital customer service and digital workplace. Today, cPaaS platforms are evolving to address this new class of enterprise communication requirements.
– Gartner
CPaaS leverages cloud technology to offer businesses of all sizes the ability to develop and embed communication features without having to invest in purpose-built applications. It provides businesses with a complete development framework that integrates real time communication (RTC) features into their existing communication stack. CPaaS typically includes software tools, sample codes, pre-built applications and standards-based application programming interfaces (APIs). CPaaS vendors also offer product support and documentation to help developers throughout the development process. Certain vendors also provide software development kits (SDKs) and libraries for building applications on different systems (desktops, mobiles etc.)
A CPaaS solution helps brands execute engagement strategies over multiple channels and devices, along with smart workflows to build seamless customer journeys. Essentially, this means that the customer could communicate with the brand seamlessly via multiple channels (text, video, voice) from inside the same user interface or app, without having to switch the screen.
“CPaaS provides enterprises with a single omnichannel solution that seamlessly connects all popular communications platforms, whilst incorporating monitoring and analysis of customer engagement through integrated messaging, user segmentation and advanced reporting. The fact that all communication services are connected via a single portal allows a business to easily aggregate a large amount of contextual information about a customer. This information can be used between communication mediums to provide a much more personal, efficient and automated service, improving the quality of customer interaction.
What’s more, in today’s fast-moving communications marketplace, consumer preferences are continually evolving and new messaging services are being launched at a rapid rate. A CPaaS provider can offer quick support and implementation for these new mediums, helping to meet customer and business expectations – whether its chatbots designed to reduce call centre costs, social network messaging integration, or expanding the number of supported OTT applications.
The advantages of the CPaaS approach don’t stop at the customer. For businesses with increasingly mobile workforces, the model puts collaboration at the heart of a company by enabling options for team or group messaging such as voice, video and more – creating a connected workforce.”
– Adrian Benic, Vp of Product at Infobip
Although marketing automation has been around for some time now, automation tools usually lack the ability to integrate standalone communication platforms like text, voice and over the top (OTT) chat and video into business workflows. While marketing automation tools are still integral to messaging, we need to expand their scope to incorporate multiple messaging channels, more data, and better segmentation than before.
CPaaS: The next frontier of integrated communications
Whether you realize it or not, most enterprise communication frameworks have gaps or blindspots in how they enable communication with each other, or customers, or vendors. It could be something as simple as interacting with customers through text messages at scale, or as complex as manually logging customer calls. CPaaS, with its API-driven architecture enables organizations to leverage voice, video, and messaging elements with ease.
WebRTC is a powerful technology standard enabling real-time audio and video in web applications. But it’s an enabling technology–not a solution. The real promise of WebRTC is helping to design far better communications experiences. By moving communications capabilities into the world of software, through CPaaS, we can improve the communications experience and go beyond the legacy hardware-centric approaches of the past. Hardware vendors that offer “WebRTC support” only deliver a small fraction of the benefit of WebRTC. An API-driven software-first approach is required to make real gains in employee productivity and customer experience.
– Rob Brazier, Director of Product Management (Video & WebRTC) at Twilio
The CPaaS space was originally driven by startups such as Infobip, Twilio, Plivo and TokBox, which offer APIs for embedding communications, while legacy communication vendors including Genband’s Kandy and Avaya’s Breeze have now introduced new CPaaS services. It is also interesting to note that enterprise communication behemoths Cisco and Vonage have acquired startups such as Tropo and Nexmo respectively. The growth of the CPaaS market is aligned to emerging trends in customer-facing communications. One of the key growth drivers of the CPaaS market is the need for contextual communications that augments customer experience. Say, for instance, you can order a pizza using an online food delivery app, but when you want to call the restaurant and change your order, you have to use the phone because there is no feature within the app that lets you call them directly. This is because developing and maintaining a system that dependably handles RTC is unreasonably expensive and complicated. Until CPaas, that is.
Speaking about the ROI and navigating the blindspots of customer experience, Rob’s tip to marketers is, “Look for friction in your customer journeys. Good indicators can be spots where your customers are leaving a task or transaction incomplete, unnecessarily calling customer service, or searching for information on your website.
Optimize ROI by focusing on the customer, measuring cost and benefit for the journey end-to-end, and embracing iteration. Understanding the customer journey as a system of independent pieces that work together to deliver that customer goal allows you to measure the cost at each point in the value chain.”
CPaaS doesn’t force you to take a rip and replace ‘big bet’ approach. CPaaS instead dramatically reduces the cost of experimentation and radically increases the flexibility available to any customer or employee interaction. You can break down a complex problem into bite-size peces, optimize them one at a time, and measure at every step of the way.
– Rob Brazier
As a marketer you know that your customers have unique interests and needs, but you also know that certain groups of customers behave in similar ways. One of the key facets of omnichannel communications, as powered by CPaaS tools, is segmenting your customers into groups, who can receive personalized messages that highlight their online behavior. Within a CPaaS system it’s easy to say, “Thank you Bob for being such a valuable customer, here’s 10% off your next upgrade of our Email Marketing SoftwareOpens a new window ” and also say, “Thank you Carol for being such a valuable customer, here’s 10% off your next purchase of our Content Marketing research paper” for customers with similar buying profiles, even though the product is completely different. CPaaS also helps you understand how your customers like receiving your message. While Bob likes to interact over emails, Carol likes SMS – this is how you reach those sub-segments of each larger segment.
In the recent years, it’s become less about finding what and how to say it but more about which channels, platforms and devices best suit an audience. Business must make sure they’re engaging with consumers using communications services that work for them. There’s no point pushing out a promotional message across email if the majority of your customer base no longer check their email and are mostly active on Viber. Enterprises must take advantage of the data on their networks and use split test engagement to identify where audiences prefer to be engaged. With this information, promotions and other forms of communication will be met by a more receptive audience.
– Adrian Benic
Speaking about how CPaaS is set to transform the WebRTC space, Adrian opines, “CPaaS platforms already use WebRTC for a variety of communications services, from voice and video to chat. In that sense, WebRTC is a channel available to users of CPaaS services, integrated into their offering and available to customers – enterprises or developers – through APIs and SDKs for smartphone app integration. The challenge of WebRTC is how to achieve a sustainable and continual quality of real time communications. We’ve all seen a video call freeze or experience delays, which significantly impacts user experience. This should be a consideration for enterprises that need reliable communications solutions. WebRTC is entirely cloud-based, and it would need to be a part of an enterprise’s overarching cloud communications strategy, since on-site options are not viable.
The solution would be a full-stack CPaaS platform with a resilient global IP backbone to deliver reliable communications via WebRTC and enable a minimum of latency for a maximum user experience. With APIs or other integration options, including a hybrid cloud/on-premises approach built on top of a global infrastructure, the enterprise or developer can make the most of this flexible protocol that offers many communication opportunities.”
Choosing the right CPaaS provider
As with any major purchasing decision, asking the right questions can help you select a service provider that works for you and grows with you. Since CPaaS is still a relatively young market segment, here are a few make-or-break questions that you need to ask yourself before you take the leap.
CPaaS is not a DIY solution yet!
CPaaS essentially provides developers with tools they need to create unique and robust app-based customer experiences without having to build all the back-end infrastructure from scratch — just a simple API integration is all that’s required. However, certain solutions may require advanced development skills, depending on how you use the API.
Although certain vendors do provide a plug-and-play solution, where you just need to plug into your high-speed internet to access all the communication tools the CPaaS platform offers. Most CPaaS solutions require basic level API integration.
What are the features that your business needs? Most CPaaS vendors offer basic voice and messaging services, however there are a few niche players who also offer services such as MMS, video messaging, group messaging etc. Before zeroing down on a CPaaS vendor, you need to ensure what your business exactly needs.
Does the platform offer flexibility to make changes and APIs to support integrations? The best thing about a CPaaS solution is the extensive customization options that it offers, allowing you to pick the exact features your business needs and updating them as your business evolves. Solutions that provide code-level access to make modifications to the CPaaS solution is a huge plus that will help you increase productivity and drive bottom-line business growth.
Does the platform meet all your security and compliance requirements? A great CPaaS solution delivers built-in scalability, security and compliance as a result of being hosted on the cloud. With a scalable and secure CPaaS solution, apps built on the platform feature the benefits of those measures with zero additional effort from your end.
Finding the answers to these questions will help you differentiate CPaaS vendors, pinpoint potential providers and eventually find the perfect fit. Successfully implementing a CPaaS strategy will help you add scalable, flexible messaging to internal and customer-facing applications without making a huge, upfront investment in back-end infrastructure.
Sushman, a graduate in Communications and Journalism, learnt the ins and outs of B2B content marketing at his first job stint, where he worked closely with global thought leaders across industries including Finance, Marketing, Human Resources and Cyber Security. At MarTech Advisor, Sushman writes on cutting-edge ways organizations can harness marketing technology to drive growth. When not writing, Sushman loves his motorcycling holidays. A traveler, who has clocked nearly 50,000 miles on his motorcycle since 2014, Sushman has his eyes set on completing a cross-Asian biking expedition by 2022.
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