CPaaS is a cloud-based platform that enables companies to set up contextual multichannel campaigns globally, for every stage of the customer journey. CPaaS uses APIs to connect multiple channels for voice, text, video, and more, on a single platform.
Because of its customizability, companies can scale their multichannel approach at any point in time easily. With CPaaS, they can add new channels and constantly improve their existing channels as well, while owning their infrastructure.
Customer experience is the differentiator in today’s crowded digital landscape. With CPaaS, companies can not only meet customer expectations but also exceed them. So it’s no surprise that the CPaaS market is valued at USD 12.5 billion as of 2022 and is set to grow to USD 45.3 billion by 2027.
That’s a 29.4% CAGR for the period, making it one of the fastest-growing solutions in the industry.
CPaaS helps companies across industries build an optimized channel mix that goes beyond the usual SMS or IVR approach.
Source: Smartcomsummit
CPaaS is growing in importance for enterprises because the results are measurable and immediate, across every channel that CPaaS integrates.
What does this mean for businesses?
CPaaS overview
Improve customer journey
Reach users on their preferred channels
Push and collect data at each touchpoint
Reduce time to market for new products and services
SMS remains one of enterprises' most popular A2P (application-to-person) channels. It accounts for 56.3% of all CPaaS spending.
Personalized SMS is extremely popular among customers as well. Studies show that 72% of consumers interact only with personalized messages — and SMS open and response rates are more than five times higher than for email, making it the most effective channel.
SMS is also the top channel that customers rely on for getting booking confirmations and security alerts.
Email is a versatile and useful platform that companies can use throughout the customer journey, and is particularly effective during the ‘awareness’ stage, where interactions might require less immediacy.
However, email is a channel that can very easily become siloed and one-dimensional. It isn’t a channel that is conducive to immediate replies and is therefore not favored by customers today who want a much faster, always-on mode of communication with brands. While email is a good channel to use as a complement to other channels, brands should move away from email as their most important customer communication channel, and focus on real time communications.
RCS is famously dubbed SMS 2.0 and can be used by businesses to offer group chat options, HD images, videos, and more, to customers to induce more action from them. This channel shows a very high success rate and has been adopted by brands across all industries — from travel and retail, to food delivery or transport. Research shows that close to 80% of customers find RCS appealing and that it would make them want to communicate with a brand more. Brands can use RCS in addition to WhatsApp to reach a wider audience.
OTT apps like WhatsApp for Business allow 2-way, regular interactions which help understand customer sentiments in more depth.
Given that WhatsApp has close to 2 billion monthly active users from over 180 countries, it is no surprise that over 5 million businesses are already using or planning to use it for conversational customer engagement. With the easy exchange of text, files, voice messages, chat filters, and so much more, WhatsApp can be the most meaningful channel in your mix.
This is a critical channel, especially for enterprises. Interactive Voice Response (IVR) reduces the workload on the company’s support personnel, but because it’s so impersonal, the channel is synonymous with bad customer experience.
But with CPaaS, the IVR can be interconnected to other channels and help provide a smooth experience for the customers as well as the employees.
For example, instead of making customers go through extensive menu options, it can be limited to 5 relevant courses of action — this reduces the abandonment rate. Intelligent IVR can also push the call toward other channels and empower customers with self service.
When customers finally do reach an employee, the customer information must be available to the employee via the CRM so that they can help out the customer immediately rather than ask for unnecessary confirmations. This makes part of the process personalized and shows the customer that their time is valued.
Another way that voice as a channel makes an impact is through call recording and transcriptions that help companies analyze and improve their customer service as well as provide actionable feedback to their employees.
Tip: Speech recognition technology can be used in IVR where customers can be asked to leave a message — their voice is then translated to text, relevant words are picked up, and then automatically transferred to the right department. Sentiment analysis can also be used to escalate the call back right away. This reduces the effort for employees as well as customers, leading to faster resolutions.
Chatbots are simple yet powerful channels capable of automating customer conversations in a way that keeps customer satisfaction high as well.
Chatbots have the perfect mix of automation and human conversation, where support agents only come in when the situation requires it. Bots can be connected to other channels seamlessly, helping customers continue their conversation with support agents via email, voice, or text without losing any context.
With the rapid improvements taking place daily in AI tech, chatbots can bring a lot of value to customers as well as the company in a cost-effective, impactful manner.
This is a really powerful channel that can induce new transactions, re-engage cold leads, or remind old customers to trigger more goal completions. Take a look at Uber Eats’ push notification strategy — it uses regional, and timezone-specific data to ensure that customers receive the right message at the right time.
Source: Uber
While voice and chat are good channels for customer communication (they can be fairly personalized and quick), nothing beats the personal touch of face-to-face interactions. Smart, programmable videos fill this gap by giving customers intuitive information through manual or AI assistance, on demand.
Providing a video call option to your customers is quickly becoming a popular option for a lot of brands as it helps establish trust a lot faster. Programmable videos also enable AI-based video engagement to help answer customers at any time. The video feed can be used for user authentication (e.g. for banks), or remote customer support (e.g. for accommodation marketplaces).
While each of these channels is powerful in its own right, CPaaS combines all of them on a single platform. With CPaaS, companies can integrate and add cloud-based multichannel campaigns even to their on-premises tech stack. This is the way to go — enterprises today need to be available to customers on multiple channels and be more agile.
The best part is that they can do this while keeping customer engagement and experience at the center of it all. CPaaS creates a coherent, cohesive journey for the company, its employees, and of course, its customers.