CPaaS Market Trends: Reshaping Customer Engagement Strategies
The CPaaS market trends show that the industry is clearly on the rise. While companies are increasingly looking for more flexible, scalable solutions to manage their communications effort with their customers, Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS in short) has risen to meet this demand.
The total CPaaS market value is projected at $10 billion in 2022
CPaaS allow companies to quickly and easily integrate different communication channels. However we choose to interact with our customers, whether with voice, messaging, video or more, this integrated effort recognises that things have shifted significantly in this increasingly digital age.
The CPaaS growth is about moving in tandem with this shift. It means that with the increase in digitalization, we add digital channels and digital communication to meet customers wherever they may be. It also means creating a more unified communications strategy. When companies can do that successfully, they increase both customer engagement and satisfaction.
Why CPaaS is revolutionising customer engagement
We are witnessing a true revolution in how companies communicate with and sell to their customers.
There has been an explosion in communication channels, with customers moving from phone and in-store conversations to channels like WhatsApp, Viber, Messenger, Line, WeChat and the emerging RCS. What’s more, customers expect companies to always have someone on the end of each of these lines, which, when you’re a global brand potentially dealing with millions of customers, is no mean feat.
In fact, the only way it’s feasible is with technology. New-generation chatbots use artificial intelligence to create personalised and surprisingly human experiences for the customer. In fact their capabilities extend far beyond chat, leading and directly managing the purchase process from end to end.
The COVID-19 crisis has accelerated the adoption of this tech and how it’s used. With emergent technologies facilitating rich, automated and real-time communication, companies can proactively contact customers through the array of new channels, driving conversations without needing to spend inordinate amounts of time or money to do so. Chatbots, when compared with human customer service reps, are cheap.
A health insurance company, for example, no longer needs a human doctor to attend every consultation. It instead utilises an AI engine to conduct an initial screening, which can collect important data and even focus on specific diagnoses that can then be shown to expert human eyes.
The role of a CPaaS in bringing new technologies together
But how to bring all these disparate parts – from communication channels to AI chatbots – together? The answer is with a communication platform as a service, or CPaaS.
A CPaaS offers a complete and future-proof solution to the communication needs of a modern organisation. It opens up a whole new world of opportunities for companies, particularly in regards to engaging customers, by:
- Integrating the organisation’s systems with the CPaaS platform via a low or no-code interface
- Automating communication through chatbots and AI
- Creating sophisticated flows to enrich the customer experience
- Reporting the outcomes of the interaction in real-time
- Increasing conversions/success by communicating with the customer through their preferred channel
What actors come to bear on the growth of the CPaaS market trends
First, there has been a noticeable acceleration by companies to take on a digital-first communication approach due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Second, companies want quick, easy and reliable solutions they can access. With fraud becoming more widespread, relying on providers and their service offerings becomes even more important. Reputable CPaaS providers will not only help manage a variety of communication channels for businesses, but they will also be continuously monitoring the security and integrity of their offering to ensure it is a trusted, reliable solution.
Third, availability is key. Top global CPaaS platforms take a multi-region, multi-cloud setup. This translates to high availability and redundancy, factors that a customer often considers paramount.
How CPaaS trends can drive the success of digital transformation
Did you know that CPaaS is capable of driving the success of your digital transformation project? Take, for example, surveys, which may be conducted either by phone or email. These have increasingly lower response rates, often below 20%.
Today, we have much richer, more interactive customer communication platforms such as WhatsApp and rich communication services (RCS). RCS is the future of text messaging, replacing the SMS (short message service) as a more interactive tool.
How The CPaaS Market Has Reshaped The Way We Do Business
Both WhatsApp and RCS offer richer messaging through the use of video, images and audio to increase engagement. As a result, companies can obtain much higher response rates to their surveys which, in turn, help them to take action quicker than their competitors.
With a CPaaS platform, companies can quickly and easily configure such impacts on customer terminals and obtain either aggregated or granular information as and when required.
The impact of the CPaaS Trends on remote work
Until recentlywe relied on voice or email as our primary communication channels. However, these are saturated channels – they simply do not capture an individual’s attention in its entirety.
Newer channels are now open to us such as WhatsApp Business or RCS, which have shown that they can generate much higher quality impact with higher response rates. In short, CPaaS has enabled the conversations between company-to-company and between companies and users to be synchronized. As more companies explore the advantages of digital and remote work, CPaaS becomes an even more attractive option that simply cannot be ignored.
This is especially true when critical notifications such as passwords or two-factor authentication play such a fundamental role in the digital and remote world. Companies will require a robust, secure CPaaS platform for the delivery of such notifications.
Potential Challenges that impact the CPaaS Market Trends
The promise and anticipation of growth and market maturity, however, come with its own set of challenges:
- Some channels, such as RCS, may not be so commonplace and adoption may be hampered by choice of device.
- Security remains an ongoing concern. CPaaS providers need always to remain ahead of the game, offering strong security controls and keeping abreast of changes that may impact security or create new vulnerabilities. In the event of a breach, they must be able to respond quickly and effectively to mitigate damage and/or loss.
- Companies must keep abreast of different software providers, including those who offer marketing automation or CRM support. It has become clear that many of these providers are developing some of the functionalities, typically found in CPaaS platforms, within their own toolset.
- There may be channel price changes that occur outside of the CPaaS provider’s control. These include regulated price increases for SMS services, changes wrought by WhatsApp Business APIs and more.
Soprano’s innovative solution responds to CPaaS market trends
Always monitoring customer needs and changes in market trends, Soprano is a global CPaaS market leader that has engaged in a few strategic acquisitions over the years. Our latest acquisition is ubisend, a leader in conversational AI solutions for business. This has allowed us to extend our CPaaS offering with additional proprietary AI-powered messaging capabilities.
With this addition, Soprano can assist businesses to launch, manage and monitor conversational solutions as well as scale AI communication and automation across their entire organization.
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These acquisitions combined with timely, regular product enhancements are a reflection of the maturing of Soprano’s global CPaaS platform. This evolution extends way beyond APIs for messaging functionality.
In the Spanish market, for example, Soprano is a pioneer in the commercialization of RCS. As a result, we’re generating connectivity with the primary MNOs (mobile network operators).
As a true technology partner, we also invest in many activities that raise awareness with our customers as to different and potential CPaaS use cases, and we do this across the various countries where we operate.
These activities ultimately add value to a customer’s current solution and may generate changes in their communication effort, which allows for more efficiency and speed.
CPaaS is the future of mobile communication and promises to bring significant benefits to global companies who can see the value in an integrated and digital-first communications approach.
If you are interested in learning more about Soprano CPaaS, our team would love to talk with you.