What is CPaaS?

Communication with customers is – and will always be – critical for the survival of any business.

If your business isn’t able to answer a potential customer’s question fast enough – and via a channel the customer finds acceptable – they will surely be in your competitor’s hands a few moments later.

According to Statista, 48% of consumers have stopped buying from a brand during the past year due to a shortcomings in their customer service.

Ever-changing habits

New communication channels and apps emerge constantly, causing customer habits to change.

This leads to significant challenges for businesses. Building communications infrastructure and inroads to handle all these ever-changing customer habits and expectations simply becomes cost prohibitive.

So how can this be resolved?

By using APIs from established CPaaS provider – instead of building the infrastructure ground up –  it becomes possible for businesses to add new communication interfaces and inroads for customers (voice, video and messaging) with just a few lines of code.

This allows for example CRM systems, apps and business processes to be augmented with automated notifications and communication features.

No more heavy lifting

Scalability and reliability used to be the areas that consumed most effort when building communication solutions in the past. These never ending headaches – with late night fire drills at the IT-department – are now handled by the CPaaS solutions, leaving businesses to focus on the business logic.

This allows businesses to be more agile, and get a competitive edge – with far less effort.

The business benefits of CPaaS translate into sky rocketing trajectories for future growth.

IDC forecasts a compound annual growth rate of 33% over a five-year forecast period.  Statista expects that the CPaaS market will grow from 7 billion USD in 2020 to 26 billion USD in 2025.

“While voice and SMS remain critical to CPaaS, video and OTT messaging [messaging that isn’t SMS] will assume increasing importance in the coming years.” says IDC.

CPaaS is taking off, so make sure that your business isn’t left rusting on the ground.

Each CPaaS provider has their own mix of communication services. Most have an emphasis on telecom services such as voice and SMS, while others  lean more towards video or messaging via alternate channels. Some bring in Artificial Intelligence into the mix

Some may be based on hardened and ageing legacy platforms, dressed up to look as something new, while others may be brand new – but not yet as reliable and versatile as something more mature.

Photo by Ryoji Iwata, Timo Volz, Humphrey Muleba and SpaceX on Unsplash