MessageBird, a leading CPaaS provider, has today announced they have partnered with SparkPost to enhance their conversation API. SparkPost is trusted to send 37% of the world's business email. Rather than introducing their CPaaS offering with voice and email as bread and butter, I was interested to learn why email was being added now - when I had assumed the decision was to drive innovative technologies like chat and video.
I spoke to MessageBird CEO, Robert Vis, to hear why MessageBird is still talking about email in 2019. The conversation API is designed to unify voice, video and chat conversations. Modern tech. However, Robert referenced the very real scenario where we are still sending emails for banks and for flight bookings.
"It's super important that calls connect and are high quality, however email is still in play just as much today and these qualities apply here too"
Why email?
I asked Robert what made MessageBird find an email provider to add to their conversation API. Robert said the reasons were twofold. "In terms of internal communications, email may be redundant. Tools like Slack have enabled this very well. But, for external communications, there is no individual channel ruling the world. Even fax is still in use. The legacy that email will have is huge and the reality is that email is sometimes efficient. Maybe in a millennial world, everybody is texting five, six, seven words. But, we need to cater for all personas and email is still high on the list for a lot of people".
Knowing your customers' customer
It was refreshing to hear that the MessageBird ethos is about understanding who their customer's customers is - and what the user's requirements are. Robert said "Even though we're a B2B company, focused on enterprise, our product philosophy is around the consumer and what do they want to use. The technology world has disrupted the customer experience industry. Rather than in the old days, where businesses had a monopoly over some industries, customer service is now a big issue. The consumer can leave and retaining customers is a priority".
Every company is a software company
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Robert Vis[/caption]
