With everyone connecting online, through chat, social media, email, video conferencing and more, it is imperative for digital touchpoints to be convenient, intuitive, and easy to use. The digitally savvy customer demands instant resolution and service, thus, delivering exceptional customer experiences has become the success mantra for businesses to compete in this new experience economy. Business and technology leaders see CPaaS as a valuable addition to existing as-a-service operations for unified communications.
Enterprise spend on CPaaS is ramping up. Frost and Sullivan found that 67% of enterprise will increase or maintain existing investment in CPaaS, and IDC research estimates the market for CPaaS will be $17.7 billion by 2024. Clearly, enterprises are turning to CPaaS to stay ahead in finding new, innovative ways to up the customer experience quotient.
By helping organizations build an optimized channel mix of new applications on top of existing services, CPaaS enables the creation of omnichannel solutions. Some of the widely used applications for CPaaS include:
Rise of self-serve. A Gartner study found that 70% of customers actively use self-service channels at some point in their resolution journey. Self-serve channels such as chatbots, online portals, and FAQs are a must-have for businesses. In fact, companies are vying to simplify employee and customer issue resolutions through conversational chatbots with a human service agent stepping in only in complex situations.
CPaaS is the Go-To Platform. As enterprises race to implement more robust self-service channels, particularly in industries such as healthcare, banking, and travel, Communication Platform as a Service (CPaaS) is emerging as the go-to platform to deploy a variety of automated inbound and outbound customer communication, including:
How CPaaS is driving customer engagement
While the more agile and digital-first enterprises pioneered CPaaS adoption, today, more and more established businesses recognize the relevance of a differentiated and hyper-personalized approach to customer engagement. Intelligent enterprises are now embracing CPaaS to enable omnichannel communication for internal and external engagement. As the technology adoption has matured, CPaaS has become the new benchmark for solving communications challenges and driving business growth. AI and NLP technologies in the contact center solutions and smart shopping assistants make product purchase recommendations, accurate and real-time based on the user’s browsing history reducing the need for expensive multilingual customer support representatives. APIs could provide CPaaS video chat and AI capable of facial recognition to turn any phone or webcam into a biometric security checkpoint. Chatbots will continue to grow in scope and capacity, allowing any business to deploy entire teams of automated agents entirely made up of bots.
CPaaS ENABLES OMNICHANNEL CUSTOMER COMMUNICATION
Conversational Automation: As the name suggests, conversational automation involves automating conversations with customers, usually with a bot. This provides a hyper-personalized experience to customers, saves time and effort of employees, leads to higher employee satisfaction and productivity, delivers improved customer satisfaction, and augments revenue and sales.
Contextual Communication: When customers initiate a conversation with a business, they expect seamless experiences across channels. CPaaS eliminates the need for customers to establish context as they move between channels for the same issue or query. For instance, office retail company Staples leveraged CPaaS as part of its IoT-driven virtual assistant to help businesses manage office supplies. Employees can order office supplies, track orders or connect with a contact center agent on various channels, such as voice commands, mobile apps, email, SMS, or even Slack.
Conversational Commerce: Conversational commerce involves interacting with customers in a friction-free way and on their preferred communication channel, increasing customer engagement and eventually expanding revenue. For instance, with access to more than 1.6 billion users across 180+ WhatsApp Business and WhatsApp Business API, industry leaders are excited about leveraging the platform to connect with their customers. The apps’ rich media capabilities may be ideal for sharing pictures, videos, PDFs, and more, enabling support teams to answer product queries directly to the customer. Companies can leverage CPaaS to provide communication in real-time (think abandoned cart reminders, delivery tracking, and shipping alerts) across the customer’s preferred communication platform.
CPaaS will bring an innovative platform play for Enterprises beyond mere communication channels by enabling tools, workflows, best practices and verticalized use cases to address ‘fit for purpose’ market needs. The user experience provided through automation, contextualization and conversations on top of CPaaS platforms helps enterprises to deliver immense value by not taking a conventional ‘one size fit all’ approach.
