Excellent customer relationships are the most-used not-so-secret weapon for successful businesses. In this digital age, companies are building excellent customer relationships through strategic and well-planned methods for personalized communication. However, this is a time of omnichannel customer contact. The scope for communication extends across telephonic, SMS, Internet-based IM communications, emails, campaigns, and many more mediums. That makes the task of personalized communications a bit more complex.
In the past, businesses had to build their own communications infrastructure to support such initiatives. But fast forward to today, when they have a unified solution available at their disposal via the cloud. We are talking about Communications Platform as a Service or CPaaS.
What is CPaaS?
In simple terms, CPaaS is a cloud-based umbrella solution that facilitates real-time communication through channels like SMS, Voice, Email, Chatbot, etc. The framework leverages APIs through which enterprises can integrate the desired communication channels into their digital applications effortlessly.
For example, if you run an eCommerce business, then all your customer communications can be easily handled through a single CPaaS platform. Different departments like marketing, sales, dispatch, delivery, etc. can initiate the desired notification messages through the solution. It can be configured according to every specific need.
5 ways in which CPaaS is helping enterprises today
Gartner predicts that by 2025, nearly 95% of global enterprises will leverage CPaaS to improve their business communications. This is because CPaaS has the potential to offer some truly exhilarating benefits for businesses that utilize them.
Let us explore the top 5:
Facilitate real-time communications
The major advantage of CPaaS is that it facilitates real-time communication between customers and the business. Traditionally, this was possible only with person-to-person interactions that happened in stores or via telephonic conversations. With CPaaS, there is a huge opportunity for businesses to build autonomous personal communication channels in real-time. They can use SMS, automated voice calls, WhatsApp, or Chatbots to deeply engage with their customers at any time.
The conversations can be triggered in real-time by any desired trigger event. For example, when a shopped product is shipped from the warehouse or when a delivery agent picks up the food ordered via a food delivery app and so on. Every communication sent out can be personalized with permitted data from customers to build a very engaging communication experience.
Empower marketing
With CPaaS, businesses can equip their marketing teams with a direct communication channel with several engagement options. Rich text or media like videos and images can be shared with customers through integrated WhatsApp and other social media messaging applications.
They can also use the CPaaS solution to segregate target customer populations into buckets for more effective targeting through campaigns. Platforms like CPaaS+ from GTS offer even more attractive features like tracking campaigns, analytics on the performance of campaigns, etc. Such solutions can provide real-time visibility into several crucial aspects thereby helping marketers fine-tune their approaches easily and more effectively.
Enhance security
As businesses compete to win customers through best-in-class apps, there are often security concerns that they run into like fraudulent access, impersonations, etc. With CPaaS, enterprises can add additional layers of security to their digital communication approaches. They can use it to deploy authentication mechanisms via SMS OTPs or automated flash call verification, etc.
An additional feature that enterprises can leverage is the ability to offer masked number communications to customers. This helps in protecting against the misuse of the customer’s data.
24*7 availability for support operations
CPaaS solutions don’t just help by enabling communication channels. They can also allow enterprises to automate the operation of such channels. We have already seen how applications like food delivery apps and eCommerce can use CPaaS for real-time notifications. On a different note, the same capability can help set up 24*7 support operations for customers.
This is extremely important when you want to expand your digital business globally as support operations need to be run 24*7. Customer queries can be answered with AI-enabled response systems integrated into your content generation workflows for SMS, Chatbots, etc.
Cost-effective
Irrespective of the business size, having a reliable communication experience with customers is critical for growth. But for smaller businesses, investing in massive communication infrastructure will be a very tough proposition. With CPaaS, this challenge is easily resolved. The solution provides two major capabilities. One is the ability to offer subscription-based pricing since it is a SaaS platform running on the cloud. The second benefit is the modular flexibility it offers for adding communication channels on demand.
Enterprises can use CPaaS as a plug-and-play solution wherein they can add communication channels one after the other depending on the business growth. They can add the desired engagement functionality on specific apps or digital services as per demand. The modular flexibility results in them paying only for what’s needed at that point of time in their business growth journey.
One-stop communication is a competitive advantage
CPaaS is an extremely powerful tool for today’s businesses to revolutionize their customer communication experiences. Building a sustainable competitive edge requires businesses to be able to be closer to their customers, nurturing their interests and engaging them constantly. With CPaaS, all this becomes possible out of a single one-stop solution.
However, making the right call in selecting the CPaaS solution is also equally important. This is where GTS can help make a difference. Our CPaaS + platform is equipped with advanced features that go beyond the traditional capabilities of CPaaS solutions. Get in touch with us for a quick demo and decide for yourself.