The digital world is now a fundamental part of our day-to-day lives.
Everyone is connecting online, through chat, social media, email, video conferencing and more. What’s more, we expect every digital touchpoint we encounter to be convenient, intuitive, and easy to use. For business leaders to compete in this new experience economy, they need to offer the right technology to support dynamic customer interactions.
Communications Platform as a Service, or CPaaS, is quickly grabbing attention as a must-have solution for agile innovation in the business landscape. This simple and flexible solution for business growth allows today’s companies to explore new ways of serving their customers, without having to overhaul and rebuild their entire infrastructure.
At its core, CPaaS is a framework for adding new value to a business model. It’s part of the API landscape, offering companies versatile access to new tools and functionality at a pace that suits them. Many business leaders see CPaaS as a valuable addition to existing as-a-service operations for unified communications and contact centre initiatives. The extra flexibility means that teams can embed all kinds of disruptive technology into the workplace at their own pace.
CPaaS could be the ultimate change enabler for businesses.
What is CPaaS (and why is it so valuable)?
CPaaS, or Communications Platform as a Service, is a cloud-based solution intended to facilitate communications across various channels. Through CPaaS, businesses can integrate easily accessible communications capabilities into a range of business applications, creating custom workflows that manage inbound and outbound communications more effectively.
What makes CPaaS particularly compelling, is that it allows teams to unlock unique and disruptive capabilities for communication more effectively, at a price point they can afford. The potential of the marketplace means that IDC predicts CPaaS will be worth around $17.7 billion by the time we hit 2024. What’s more, new providers are appearing on the market all the time.
More than just an alternative to UCaaS, CPaaS is a doorway to innovation, delivered through flexible solutions. CPaaS means that you can access new functionality for your company within a matter of minutes or hours (rather than days). You can also switch functionality on and off, which means that you pay only for the services you actually need.
CPaaS goes beyond the one-size-fits-all solutions of previous communication and customer experience systems, to deliver something that’s constantly evolving and dynamic enough to serve any business.
How Businesses Can Use CPaaS as a Change Enabler
Almost every business today is looking for a way to boost customer experiences, empower employees, and drive new growth opportunities. CPaaS could be the answer in many cases, thanks to its incredible flexibility. Here are some of the ways that organisations can use CPaaS as a change enabler.
To enhance customer service
Today’s customers demand more than ever from the businesses that they interact with. Not only do they want an excellent experience at all times, but they want that experience to be delivered on the channels they choose, without any disruption.
CPaaS gives companies the freedom to add avenues to their customer service strategy whenever and however they like. You can implement messaging apps, video, and SMS into your customer service strategy, and align everything so that your agents can access the same information about a customer on any channel. This means that your team members can retain the crucial information they need to deliver consistent experiences wherever your audience interacts with you.
With integrations to your CRM system and other essential tools, companies can transform the customer journey one step at a time, creating something that’s specially designed to suit each individual client.
To enhance employee experience
Many of the biggest benefits of CPaaS are often linked to customer experience. However, you can use this tool as a change enabler for employee experience too. CPaaS can offer HR professionals a way to keep team members informed through company-wide updates and announcements. It can also provide your internal employees with more ways to communicate and collaborate wherever they are.
With CPaaS, business leaders can easily implement feedback tools into their system, so that their employees can constantly provide information on what they need to do their best work. You can even implement more tools for convenient communication into the services employees already use.
Proactive innovation
The biggest benefit of CPaaS by far is its ability to support innovation at the speed that suits the company. You can implement new tools and functionality at the pace that suits you, and you don’t have to risk your budget either. With CPaaS, for instance, companies can implement self-service tools and AI assistants that take extra pressure off employees, and help customers enjoy a more independent service journey.
CPaaS could be an excellent way to engage and interact with consumers in new ways through the implementation of chatbots and AI systems that can even track the sentiment of a customer during a call or predict what kind of assistance they may need based on previous interactions. CPaaS can even detect whether customer calls are coming from mobile devices, to give agents more insight into the kind of features a customer can access.
Making Constant Innovation Easy
CPaaS isn’t just a valuable tool for change enablement among companies making their first steps into digital transformation. The CPaaS environment transforms static and immovable communication strategies into environments that are open and ready for endless innovation. CPaaS is all about bringing true flexibility into the communication stack – a crucial factor in a world where customer and employee expectations are constantly changing.
Because CPaaS is so easy to access and adapt to suit your needs, there’s no limit to what you can accomplish, and no demands on how quickly you have to evolve. Going forward, CPaaS will only continue to open new doors for companies who want to drive better outcomes for their customers in a changing communications space. The more you invest in your flexible platform, the more you can discover the true benefits of CPaaS.
