Communications platform as a service (CPaaS) adoption is accelerating as organisations manage multichannel environments in order to serve their customers better and operate more efficiently. IDC forecasts the segment will grow to $17.2 billion in 2023 and this does reflect the fact that CPaaS use case implementations have grown significantly over the last couple of years.
“In the last two years, a lot has changed,” confirmed Arti Yadav, Director of Global Marketing at SAP Digital Interconnect. “There are a lot more companies that are willing to try different use cases for CPaaS and when they look at a customer’s journey they’re looking at multiple facets of how they engage. Along this journey customers use different communications and engagement channels.”
The use of multiple channels is creating an omni-channel world in which customers can communicate with organisations using whatever method they prefer but it is a continuously developing situation.
Evolving with the customer
“In the past you had just a few channels like email, voice and text messaging but today, it’s a very different world and something new is popping up every day,” added Yadav. “With numerous messaging channels now available to consumers, they are choosing how they’d like to engage with enterprises and this means enterprises need to evolve very quickly.”
This need for speed means the siloed approaches of the past in which new channels were added in a standalone way cannot be replicated. All the channels must be able to talk to and across each other and SAP Digital Interconnect believes that CPaaS can solve this challenge, unlocking the value of operational and experiential data.
Interconnected experiences
“It’s not just how you use data for better experience management, it’s also the ability to switch between channels,” said Yadav. “The ability to help identify the right channel between social, email, text or others and then offer them via APIs to enable a seamless switch between channels based on customer’s preference and availability, is compelling. It’s about being where customers like to be.”
Serving customers using their preferred channel has obvious attractions but it’s vital the information is centralised and fed back and each channel is integrated into corporate systems. “Enterprises were confined by the channels that existed as well and CPaaS gives them greater flexibility to serve their customers better,” explained Yadav. “They can expand their base of channels and be more robust.”
“With CPaaS you don’t have to be a massive enterprise and for many it enables a shift from having a single channel to becoming multichannel and ultimately omni-channel”
Successful implementations
For enterprises looking to implement CPaaS there are a few key aspects to keep in mind. The offerings should have global reach via the channels they offer and their network connectivity. They should have scalable APIs and a robust developer support, this is vital in order to continue to add new channels as they emerge and SAP Digital Interconnect sees itself as having an important role in this. “It’s about enabling enterprises and developers to work with channels in a way that is simple and easy to use, and can be quickly up and running via application program interfaces (APIs),” she added. “These are the key things enterprises we’ve been engaging with speak to us about.”
