MessageBird has been making strides in the CPaaS market since its initial funding in 2017. MessageBird has gone from strength to strength securing customers like Domino’s Pizza, Telegram and Uber. The latter being a significant badge shared with rivals, Twilio. It’s the win of Uber that really stands out. As a business built in the cloud, with 12,000 employees and annual revenue of $6.5bn, MessageBird has been a little coy about the win of Uber. Twilio confirmed that Uber continues to be a large customer of theirs too. Uber was Twilio’s 2nd largest customer in Q3 and made up 4% of their Q3 revenue.
Uber CPaaS
There is no published Uber case study so I don’t have the detail of what Uber consume or why they don’t take all CPaaS and API services from Twilio. However, there is a subtle hint on their SMS product page. The chosen graphic to display the SMS API is one of an SMS informing a customer that their Uber driver has arrived.
It may just be that the Uber case study hasn’t been written yet. Speaking from experience, the period between implementation and case study seems an eternity. Enterprises have other things to be getting on with. It should be one customer that MessageBird continues to pester until this is completed. A cloud giant, such as Uber, purchasing services from a competitor, is a marketing dream.
How Do MessageBird Get Close To Twilio?
MessageBird’s tactic of choice is being extremely customer-centric. Knowing your customer’s customer works wonders when playing in the customer experience market. UC Today Publisher, Rob Scott, reflected on an interview with Robert Vis, CEO for MessageBird:
“Modern consumers want the opportunity to connect with businesses using the same strategies they would use to speak to family and friends. To keep up with this shift in preferences, organisations need to find a way to stay on the frontlines of an impactful, engaging and interactive customer experience”.
Twilio’s marketing is always focused on customer experience. However, their play is more around pleasing their own customer – the developer. Perhaps, the future of CPaaS is split into two categories. Developer and Customer Service. Where the UCaaS market is typically divided into verticals, providers specialising in travel, retail or warehousing for example, CPaaS could inadvertently establish it’s own angle. This would prove beneficial for the industry as a whole, but especially MessageBid who just seem to get customer experience.
What To Expect From MessageBird?
In terms of a core feature set, MessageBird advertises the following:
- Voice – Build international phone call capabilities on our fault-tolerant VoIP platform
- SMS – Reach any phone, anywhere, with the speed and power of our APIs and global carrier network
- Programmable conversations – Access the world’s most popular communication channels through a single API
- Video – Integrate live interactive video calling into your app, website or communication system
MessageBird has 11,000 customers who make 300 million API calls each month. Each of these is utilising similar functionality to that available on Twilio. As the market becomes more aware of CPaaS, the natural curiosity will be to seek the alternative to the market leader. It speaks volumes that the first autofill suggestion when searching Google was MessageBird (vs Twilio). As the pioneers anticipate more competition this year, they need look no further than MessageBird.
