In an increasingly competitive digital landscape, Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) can be the answer to all your customer engagement prayers. This platform enables companies like yours to easily create contextual campaigns on a global scale across multiple channels. With high customizability and endless integration possibilities, when used right, CPaaS can drive sales, increase customer retention, and streamline your operations.
How do you make CPaaS work for your company?
You start by choosing the right CPaaS provider.
Just like customer experience, the standards that make good communication platforms are constantly evolving, and there are more new channels and elements being included in this platform every day.
Whether you develop it in-house or partner with a provider, you will need to keep up with evolving technologies. Beyond AI and chatbots, here are some of the emerging trends:
1. IoT integrationThere are always new use cases and applications popping up—anything that will make customer engagement better. Especially considering the growing number of connected devices today, it makes perfect sense that IoT integration is becoming increasingly important in the CPaaS market. IoT integration extends the brand’s ability to communicate with customers making connectivity and device-driven communication essential for customer engagement. Using CPaaS, for example, airlines can track checked-in bags in real time and send live updates to customers.
With the advent of 4G and 5G networks, customer engagement can become richer and more multi-dimensional. Companies can take advantage of high-speed, low-latency networks to share real-time videos and multimedia images via RCS, WhatsApp, etc. This means better collaboration and communication, and the best part is that this high-quality experience can be extended to customers across the globe without glitches.
Secure, decentralized communication and collaboration, end-to-end encrypted messaging, and ultra-secure data storage—these are just a few of the many advantages that communication platforms can leverage with blockchain technology. This is one of the most powerful tech advancements predicted and could lead to big changes in how the world views customer experience.
With customer journeys going digital, more and more brands are being accessed by customers, employees, and partners from all over the world. To communicate and collaborate with all parties easily, communication platforms must be deployed on a global scale. This global reach enables organizations to expand their reach and tap into new markets while improving their outreach capabilities.
The world of customer engagement is full of constant and rapid technological advancements. Companies can take full advantage of these fast changes by teaming up with CPaaS experts like BICS. Our dedicated teams are constantly alert for such trends and working to infuse all of the right developments into the platform, allowing organizations to build more channels into their mix effortlessly.
BICS Communications platform makes it extremely easy for enterprises to onboard the platform onto their existing systems without a single line of code. A customer engagement platform should be able to integrate seamlessly into your CRM, team communication tools like Teams or Slack, and the rest of your tech stack to let you make the best of the software right away.
But, the needs and requirements of different companies require different models, so let’s explore a few approaches.
This approach involves companies building their own CPaaS platform from scratch by leveraging its existing capabilities and APIs. This DIY CPaaS approach is perfect for companies that require a highly customized solution and have the in-house development expertise to do so. In this approach, the organization handles the development, design, coding, testing, deployment, and maintenance, all in-house. This is time-consuming and can be expensive, but it also has its advantages:
Customizability
Your organization can tailor the solution to meet your specific requirements by developing the platform in-house
Cost savings
If your organization has in-house development expertise, it may save costs. If it doesn’t, however, this is not a recommended approach
Control
You have full control over the development and deployment of the solution
What if your company doesn’t really want the trouble of developing and maintaining its own CPaaS platform but still wants to maintain control over its design, and the development of it?
CPaaS providers like BICS works with clients to build tailored solutions that fit all of their unique needs. While BICS provides the support and guidance to help create the CPaaS solution, the organization retains full control over the direction of the platform. This popular approach to CPaaS for enterprises is the perfect balance between DIY CPaaS and cost-effective customization. To sum up the advantages of this method:
Expertise
Organizations can tap into the expertise of CPaaS providers like BICS to help co-create the solution they need
Speed
Since the provider already has the tools and resources in place, setting up CPaaS through this method is fast
Reduced risk
What if you spend ages developing a solution that ultimately doesn’t fit your requirements the way you imagined? There’s no such problem here since you have an experienced, collaborative partner, so there is minimal risk
If your organization is just getting started with CPaaS and wants to scale it quickly, choosing a pre-built CPaaS solution from experienced providers like BICS is the ideal approach.
BICS provides, deploys, and manages a ready-to-use solution - requiring minimal effort and investment from your organization. Once it’s up and running, you can always ask for further customizations as and when you need them. The process becomes easy and cost-effective thanks to the provider’s expertise and resources. The top advantages of this model would be:
Ease of use
You can have the solution up and running with minimal effort
Cost effective solution
You do not have to invest time and resources into the development process, making it a cost-effective option
Time to market
Solutions can be deployed quickly, reducing time to market