The Communication Platform as a Service (CPaaS) market is rapidly growing, as evidenced by the mergers and acquisitions we’re seeing across voice and messaging platform suppliers. This is leading to increased competition and CPaaS providers have to find ways to differentiate their services and compete on performance, security and flexibility in addition to just functionality and features.
End users expect to be able to interact with brands across a variety of channels (and that number of channels continues to grow exponentially), so providers need to ensure that they are delivering a seamless experience across them all. Think of the latest delivery apps where you order your food, get called by the restaurant to let you know they’ve run out of something, get a text to say when the food is on its way and then you can text/WhatsApp back or call via the app if the food is delayed, or even track the driver on a map.
CPaaS platforms give businesses the programmable ability to tailor every aspect of how they communicate with their customer base in the most effective way possible, and in turn, how their customers communicate back. To offer these optimised experiences, one enhancement available is to use number intelligence data to increase the speed and accuracy of voice and message delivery.
Challenges of CPaaS in 2021
Traditionally, CPaaS providers were focused on developing the right APIs required to embed communication channels and capabilities into their applications and processes. However, as competition has increased and sophistication in the market has grown, the focus has shifted to providing customers and end users with a robust, reliable, secure and high-quality service across all channels. CPaaS providers now need to not only rapidly deploy new functionality, but also efficiently maintain it and ensure their customer communications strategy is always innovative and developing, in order to provide these new and improved services.
One thing that is business critical, is that delays in message delivery or failure to connect calls is absolutely unacceptable, giving a bad user experience and leading to losses in revenue. Trust and security are also a must. Consumer data cannot be compromised, especially in the banking and finance sector where authentication is another growing area. Using a CPaaS platform to implement password verification procedures can help to minimise fraud and identity theft.
Enhance your voice and messaging solutions with number intelligence
The CPaaS providers that understand how to use number intelligence data to effectively and efficiently route and deliver voice and messaging traffic will optimise their performance and create knock-on benefits all the way to the end user.
Number intelligence provides the information to allow a platform to validate that a phone number is correct, legitimate and deliverable, while providing routing information to allow the optimum service provider to be selected for delivering the call or message.
Enabling CPaaS providers to deliver sophisticated multi-channel communications and omni-channel experiences quickly, reliably and with high quality, will help to create scalability, trust and security for them and their customer base. It will help their customers to adapt to end user demands and offer more enriched, flexible and personalised conversations across multiple channels.
Adapting to communication needs of the future
As the CPaaS industry continues to grow, new opportunities are emerging every day, powered by sophisticated APIs and growing demands for omnichannel communication amongst businesses and end users. CPaaS is a secure way for businesses to communicate, keeping the customer’s choice of communication channel at the heart of everything.
The end goal for CPaaS providers will always be improved customer interaction and efficiency, and number intelligence is just one of the ways to help achieve this while also helping companies to reduce costs by getting it right first time. To meet the modern communication needs of today, CPaaS providers will need to adapt their solutions, enhance their data and know how to analyse and use it to best effect, keep security always at front of mind, and respond in a flexible and customer-centric way.
The simplicity, extensibility, and security of CPaaS will enable business critical messages and calls to be delivered to customers and end users, creating a connected communication ecosystem for now and into the future.
