Communications platform and technology company Brightlink have been in business for 10 years now, so they’ve seen plenty of trends and innovations in the landscape through that time. With clients from SME to enterprise, their latest CPaaS release is a response to the shifting needs of customers, as they process over 35 billion of communications interactions every year.
We caught up with Brightlink CEO, Rob Chen, to look at emergent trends in demand from today’s CPaaS clients and their end users, the first of which is localisation:
“Marketing teams running outbound call centres get better results using local numbers, which callers recognise as being from their own city,”
“10 years ago that would be a real challenge to provision directly from a provider, but within our platform today that can be rapidly enabled with pre-built tools in the web interface, however many numbers are needed in any geographic location. So we’re making it easier for companies to reach their customers, and embedding that into their core business processes.”
A further game-changing shift is the integration of robust text communications services, which are critical to the engagement of digital-native consumers in 2019. In our omni-channel world, we can no longer regard certain numbers or channels as for voice-only, as a new generation expects to be able to receive and respond to written communications on their own schedule. Thus far this need has been responded to in emergent and fragmented ways, but the Brightlink CPaaS Platform 2.0 finally provides integrated tools and analytics to track customer interactions across all channels.
As Chen explained, “CMOs tend to be frustrated because despite all the rhetoric around omni-channel communications, most text messages are lost to marketers or customer service. If they put a phone number on an ad, but the someone texted it instead of calling, they’d never know – that response would not form part of the 360 degree view they expect to have of their customers. “A powerful enhancement to our platform is Brightlink MessageView, accessible on desktop or mobile, which provides a record and auditable trail of all those interactions. It’s the stuff I used to talk about as a CMO but couldn’t do”.
Brightlink’s CPaaS development strategy remains focused on aggregating supply-side offerings, to make the greatest range of targeted services available to their growing client roster, with highly individualised provisioning and set-up – enabling them to offer their customers functionality they didn’t know was possible on their existing numbers – from E911 Registration and Caller ID Registration – to uniquely personalised vanity numbers for products or individuals.
Recent Brightlink acquisitions have focused on penetration into different vertical segments, such as the recent procurement of Stitchtel Communications, “a company based here in the southeast that focused on Cloud PBX. With that came a pretty meaningful book of business, including school districts”. Perhaps the perfect example of an industry suited to cloud-based scaling rather than investment in extensive hardware and software, combined with a ‘text-me-don’t-call-me’ userbase.
“Stitchtel’s CEO of digital became our VP of enterprise sales for cloud application offerings”, Chen continued, stressing that for the future:
“we want to continue to deepen our capabilities in areas like Cloud PBX, and continue to enhance and invest in our core platform”
