Telecom & Technology Consulting
In a world driven by an ever-growing list of technologies and associated acronyms, one can be skeptical of any “emerging” solution. But Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) is one that deserves every technology leader’s complete attention.
CPaaS is a cloud-based communications platform that integrates voice, SMS, chat, and video features into your existing software. This is extremely beneficial for businesses that depend on cloud-based services, since CPaaS allows for the customization of communications infrastructures. Most critically, CPaaS streamlines the customer experience by simplifying communication integration for voice, messaging, and video.
The CPaaS category is currently worth approximately $8 billion, with analysts forecasting market growth reaching $22 billion by 2025. Much of this anticipated explosion is due to the fact that CPaaS enables businesses to engage customers through mobile apps.
Since the majority of people now see their mobile phones as a constant, essential tool, smart companies have adapted how they communicate. A CPaaS platform allows you to integrate real-time communication into your existing tools and applications – all without having to develop anything new from scratch.
The benefits of CPaaS extend to virtually all areas of the organization. With SMS marketing campaigns, you can expose your offerings to new prospects while delivering offers to current customers. For instance, you can create automated messages to remind customers about items in abandoned shopping carts, or incentivize purchase by offering personalized discounts.
SMS is especially important in the current ecommerce environment, as it creates a path for two-way messaging between you and your customers. And that’s an ability consumers prefer – nearly 80% of shoppers state they have no objection to receiving marketing texts from retailers.
CPaaS fosters sales and business support in other ways. Just like in the brick and mortar environment, online stores can suffer from unavailable or out-of-stock items. There can also be delays in shipping. As such, real-time communication is essential for informing customers on order status, responding to their inquiries, and processing returns. CPaaS allows you to easily add features to your CRM system to immediately communicate with customers regarding any aspect of their order.
Perhaps the most valuable communications feature of CPaaS is being able to improve the speed at which you deliver customer service. CPaaS gives customers a more streamlined ability to resolve issues, with the ability to directly contact customer service reps by phone, email, text, chat, and social media. By reducing response times and increasing customer satisfaction, you can convert more prospects and gain more loyal customers.
Loyalty also improves because CPaaS gathers your entire communication history with customers in a single application. With data centralized, you can understand interests and preferences and proactively suggest items based on shopping history.
In addition, CPaaS can extend the reach of your customer support personnel. For example, you can create reminders and notifications to announce new items that match customer profiles. For even more efficiency and customer satisfaction, you can create templates that automatically respond to common questions and concerns. CPaaS also allows you to add chatbots, cutting the costs involved in customer services calls with live representatives.
But no matter how you employ CPaaS, it can scale to accommodate business growth. Simply add services a la carte and adjust as necessary depending on the state of your business. Just the same, you can remove features when they become unnecessary, or if you discover over time that certain functionality wasn’t needed to begin with.
It’s this flexibility that makes CPaaS difficult to pass over. In fact, since you can customize communication channels based on your target audiences, budget, required functionality, and marketing strategies, CPaaS is the right solution for organizations of any size.
And since CPaaS is a subscription-based service, organizations only pay for what they need at any given time for their operations. While these cost savings are attractive, they get even better because of CPaaS’ inherent value proposition: As a cloud-based communications infrastructure, you don’t have to build it yourself, which means you can apply funds that would normally go to developers to create new revenue streams.
Retailers can no longer control how they communicate with customers and prospects. Today, they have to adapt to consumer expectations, and CPaaS allows them to do just that. But don’t look at this shift as a sacrifice. On the contrary, CPaaS provides new advantages for your organization.
