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When choosing a UCaaS provider service and solution, think about goals
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What is CPaaS?
CPaaS, or Communications Platform as a Service, is a cloud-based platform that allows your company to embed communications APIs into applications and create customized flows to enhance the customer and employee experience. Think SMS, voice, and video capabilities embedded into your customer-facing applications. Think integrated internal processes. Think unicorns jumping over rainbows. Think finding $20 in your coat pocket. Think hot pizza right out of the oven. It’s THAT good.
CPaaS connects people with calendars, directories, CRMs, and other business applications, giving them access to useful information and context while they communicate. With CPaaS, enterprises can program applications that fit their exact business needs to give customers and employees the best experience possible.
But what about UCaaS?
You may be thinking, “we already use UCaaS solutions to improve collaboration.” The beauty of CPaaS is that it enhances your existing solutions, including UCaaS. Whether your company is using CPaaS, or you’re just getting started with it, it’s important to understand the difference between CPaaS vs. UCaaS. While similar, they are built to address different business issues.
Check out our sweet infographic to learn more about how CPaaS & UCaaS make a dynamic duo!
Key ingredients of CPaaS
Every company needs to keep their communications spicy, yet tasteful to help boost engagement and collaboration. The recipe for truly delightful communication experiences requires a highly-scalable and customizable collection of communications capabilities that integrate with the organization’s apps, products, and services is powerful. Here’s how CPaaS provides the ingredients:
1. Scalability: CPaaS providers are able to use cloud technology to offer companies of any size the ability to easily develop and embed communications features as business needs change and grow.
2. Cost efficient: Companies using CPaaS can save on human resources, infrastructure, and time to market. Other advantages to using a CPaaS include affordable pricing models, where companies can pay for just the services they need, such as SMS, voice, or automation.
3. Easy implementation: Implementing a CPaaS solution saves businesses time with quick and simple deployments. Either through APIs or ready-to-use applications, IT and development teams can easily deploy CPaaS solutions across the company. Your IT team can help other departments build applications for their individual needs or use it for their own purposes to improve the overall tech experience for customers and employees.
4. Programmable components: CPaaS delivers unparalleled flexibility letting you implement a fully built out solution or create one that meets specific needs. You can build on top of existing solutions such as contact center or other applications. CPaaS allows developers to focus on building applications rather than on the underlying IT infrastructures.
What can’t CPaaS do?
Ok so maybe CPaaS can’t tell us our future, drive a car, or rock a fun bow tie. But it can do a lot for your business! Improving customer experiences, increasing engagement, and better understanding the customer journey are just some of the ways CPaaS helps you level up your communications strategy.
For example, healthcare providers can improve the patient experience by providing self-service options through multiple communication channels. Patients can easily and quickly take care of routine tasks like bill payment, appointment scheduling, and prescription refills.
The use of AI-powered chatbots can make it even simpler to resolve customer issues and suggest when more attention must be given to a certain customer, making your team more accessible to assist with more complex issues.
As you know, we live in a mobile-obsessed world and texting is a huge part of our lives. Business are getting on board with using text messaging to interact with customers. CPaaS makes it easy to add on SMS to applications and workflows so you can ditch time-consuming phone calls and automate things like appointment reminders, delivery confirmations, and surveys.
Companies can also use CPaaS to better track customer engagement across different communications channels. Some CPaaS providers, like IntelePeer (hint hint), have analytics tools that allow you to view the entire customer journey across multiple platforms and channels, so you can make more informed decisions that lead to the best possible customer experience.
CPaaS turning up the heat
The growth of the CPaaS market aligns with emerging trends in customer-facing communications. The market is made up of a mix of independent software vendors, systems integrators, service providers, and traditional equipment vendors. While early CPaaS initiatives can be traced back 20 years with the effort to define APIs for telephone networks, the industry has dramatically picked up pace in recent years.
Much of the rise in interest in CPaaS offerings comes from the evolution of the workplace environment. The population of employees who telecommute on a regular basis has grown 115% since 2005. Additionally, employers nationwide report a loss of about 1.8 trillion annually due to lack of employee engagement. So, enterprises find themselves desperately needing collaboration and communication tools to create a smooth and seamless work experience. CPaaS is as handy as a Swiss Army knife and can help improve internal processes and employee collaboration, along with enhancing your external communications.
As the need for CPaaS advances, so does the technology. Developers and CPaaS providers alike are finding even more creative ways to empower their company communications. The use of AI, machine learning, and automated flows is becoming more common by enterprises, and expected by customers.
IntelePeer’s CPaaS
Most providers focus their CPaaS solution to the ability of developer to embed real-time communications. But, the ability to solve day-to-day business challenges and improve customer interactions should not be limited to those that know how to code. With our out-of-the-box applications and plug-ins, end users can create and integrate workflows without needing to access development resources.
At IntelePeer, we deliver CPaaS 2.0; a full solution to accomplish digital transformation and create a better customer experience. While CPaaS 1.0 is developer-oriented communications, CPaaS 2.0 provides enterprises with omni-channel communications capabilities with end-to-end security, scalability, reliability, and strong customer support.
Here’s what you’ll get from Atmosphere Communications Platform:
- Solving business challenges with automation.
- Creating a consistent customer experience across channels.
- Accessing analytics. Lots of them.
IntelePeer understands how important it is to tackle digital transformation and are here to help. Contact us to get started today! Still not convinced? See why Frost & Sullivan highlights us as a trusted CPaaS provider.
1 (Communications PaaS: Turning Business Communications Inside Out, Raúl Castañón-Martínez 451 Research).