Organisations have been under pressure to digitize in order to provide better customer experience (CX) and operate more efficiently. Cloud transformation is a key enabler but the journey is long and this has led to fragmentation and a lack of integration between different systems as modernisation happens at different paces within organisations and the companies they interact with. The communications-platform-as-a-service (CPaaS) can play an important role here by providing a fabric to bring together different apps and integrate the various communications channels customers and workers use to enable a seamless experience.
Organisations need the right integrations to ensure different applications and different channels of engagement can interact smoothly and efficiently. Email, SMS, social and voice channels can all be used and CPaaS solutions can provide the integrations necessary. Established CPaaS solutions provide standard integrations to popular applications as part of the service, such as for emergency notifications that come with integrations for human resources systems. CPaaS fabrics offer consumer-centric, application programme interface (API)-driven solutions that enable developers and technical professionals to access interactive documentation, sample use cases and code as well as management, administration, analytics and other enablement tools to deploy enterprise services.
“The mature CPaaS provider will have standard integrations for some applications with, of course, a need for bespoke work to be performed for specific apps,”confirmed Rohit Tripathi, the Chief Product Officer at SAP Digital Interconnect, which offers a CPaaS portfolio to streamline integration of multichannel communications and microservices into backend systems. “Our SAP Contact Center 365 offering, for example, has integrations for CRM that are SAP and non-SAP and we’re offering a free trial.”
Productive remote working
CPaaS are addressing the increasing pressure CIOs face to digitalise and modernise. Increase remote working caused by COVID-19 social distancing has ramped up the urgency but Tripathi sees this as accelerating rather than being the cause of demand. “The clear demand and drive is highlighted now in COVID times but before the pandemic there was a clear drive towards digitalisation of processes,” he said. “Behind this, organisations are on a journey to cloud and assessing what to modernise and what to leave behind because it’s a dead weight. This process is driving demand for cloud-based communications.”
This top down force isn’t the only driver. “The drive also comes for lines of business such as marketing or customer support,” he added.
“They are innovating and need to innovate at the same pace as their customers. They can’t necessarily wait for a top down mandate and cloud allows the flexibility to deploy in smaller divisions and scale as needed”
COVID-related disruptions have changed the way people interact and some behavioural changes may become permanent after lockdowns end. However, Tripathi thinks enterprises shouldn’t lose track of the importance of human-to-human communication. “Social distancing is actually physical distancing – it’s not about becoming socially distant,” he said. “We’re actually more connected than ever and enterprises shouldn’t lose touch with customers. Instead they should embrace more social channels and engage where customers are present.”
Seamless customer experience
It’s not simply about integrating multiple channels. Truly seamless customer experience depends on what CPaaS enables enterprises to bring in through the channels. “You need to introduce the ability to automate on top of this and add artificial intelligence capabilities to interactions,” explained Tripathi. “Also, there is still the need to enable human-to-human interactions. There is now no central team of experts, because of COVID-19, so we could be better serving our customers anywhere, anytime in future. Having the tools is one element of the seamless customer experience but it’s more than a system, a bot and the channels, it’s tying all of these together using CPaaS that creates the seamless end customer experience.”
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