In a white paper with the SAP Digital Interconnect group, “The Critical Role of CPaaS in Reaching Customers on their Channels of Choice,” Ovum referred to communications-platform-as-a-service (CPaaS) as a “quiet revolution” for customer experience professionals.

Revenues from CPaaS are projected to grow to $5.2 billion in 2023, and 67 percent of enterprises expect CPaaS to have an impact on their organization within the next three to five years. But what exactly is CPaaS? And what are the benefits of CPaaS for your business?

What Is CPaaS?

The term CPaaS refers to a cloud-based platform that makes it easier for developers to add API-driven communications and microservices to their apps, without having to build the back-end infrastructure themselves. These capabilities can cover every channel — voice, SMS, email, and social — as well as automated communication mechanisms like chatbots.

A CPaaS offering will provide developers with APIs, sample code, and software tools, as well as support to help them through the process of implementation. These tools can be configured by the developer to meet the needs of their particular app or service.

What Are the Benefits of CPaaS?

CPaaS makes it much simpler and feasible to integrate communications features into your app or service, connecting directly to end users and consumers. Providers that can deliver multiple communications services — from enterprise messaging to social media and RCS — through a single API enable enterprises to reach a new level of agility by adding the channels they need, when they need them, without extensive development work and investment. It also handles other important considerations, like authentication, securely identifying that you are speaking to the right user, irrespective of whether you’re reaching out to them via SMS or they’re contacting you over WhatsApp.

Leading CPaaS platforms also offer intelligent messaging APIs that use failover rules, user preferences and response patterns, and data connectivity to escalate and route messages automatically among push, SMS, social, and other channels. This is vital in the modern Experience Economy, where connected customers expect to communicate with businesses in a contextual way that suits their needs

How Is CPaaS Being Used?

When Emmi Group, the largest dairy producer in Switzerland, began its digital transformation, the No. 1 priority was creating a personalized customer experience in order to get closer to customers. By utilizing an API from a CPaaS provider, Emmi easily integrated email services into its existing digital marketing platform to help drive a 31 percent increase in customer traffic and a 3x increase in conversion rate.

Meanwhile, Swedish mobile network operator Netmore Group AB used APIs to simplify access to a global digital communications network and integrated interconnectivity services for its customer base of developers. In less than one day, secure and reliable engagement services were easily integrated into app projects and the average development cycles of new apps were reduced by more than four weeks using sample use cases and code, interactive documentation, and analytics tools.

As the growth of CPaaS continues, we anticipate an ever-increasing variety of use cases, as developers continue to take advantage of the vastly simplified communications tools it puts at their fingertips.

Article was originally posted by our Event Partner, SAP Concur. 

https://news.sap.com/2019/09/benefits-of-cpaas-take-complication-out-communication/