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How CPaaS Improves the Customer Experience

By streamlining customer support channels, Communications Platform as a Service solutions help organizations cut costs and boost consumer satisfaction.

IN THIS ARTICLE

Customers want to interact with companies via their preferred support channels, and companies must connect with those customers via text, voice and, increasingly, social media to confirm appointments and deliver personalized offers. Communications Platform as a Service solutions offer a unified way for organizations to integrate new customer messaging features with their existing applications. This can result in improved customer satisfaction, lower costs, simplified IT environments and better customer analytics. However, CPaaS is a new technology for many organizations, and it comes with challenges concerning measuring ROI, managing technology and securing customer data. A trusted partner such as CDW can help organizations overcome these challenges by providing cross-industry expertise, vendor-agnostic advice, industry-specific recommendations and ongoing support.

Learn how CDW can help you meet customer expectations with innovative communications platforms.

Customers want to interact with companies via their preferred support channels, and companies must connect with those customers via text, voice and, increasingly, social media to confirm appointments and deliver personalized offers. Communications Platform as a Service solutions offer a unified way for organizations to integrate new customer messaging features with their existing applications. This can result in improved customer satisfaction, lower costs, simplified IT environments and better customer analytics. However, CPaaS is a new technology for many organizations, and it comes with challenges concerning measuring ROI, managing technology and securing customer data. A trusted partner such as CDW can help organizations overcome these challenges by providing cross-industry expertise, vendor-agnostic advice, industry-specific recommendations and ongoing support.

Learn how CDW can help you meet customer expectations
with innovative communications platforms.

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What Is CPaaS?

As businesses race to adopt artificial intelligence solutions that cut costs and lower burdens for employees, leaders sometimes overlook the impact on their most important stakeholders: customers.

In one survey, 90% of people said they prefer interacting with a human for customer service over a chatbot, with more than half saying that humans understand their needs better and provide more thorough answers. Another survey showed that 59% of consumers feel AI has caused businesses to lose the “human element” in customer service. Gartner found that 64% of customers would prefer that companies avoid using AI for customer service altogether.

This doesn’t mean organizations should avoid using emerging technologies such as AI to streamline their customer experience operations. But it does mean they must be careful to ensure that new tools are adding to customers’ satisfaction levels rather than making their experiences more cumbersome. Often, customers become frustrated not with the use of any specific technology but by complex journeys that force them to switch channels and repeat information. By unifying communication channels, organizations can leverage emerging technologies while also fostering excellent CX.

CPaaS solutions are cloud-based platforms that allow businesses and developers to embed real-time communications features such as voice, video and text messaging directly into their own applications or websites.

Virtual Agents

AI-driven chatbots or voice bots can converse with customers to handle routine queries and tasks, such as answering FAQs, checking account balances, confirming appointment times or checking order statuses. This provides instant service to customers and reduces the workload for human agents.

Rather than building and maintaining complex communications infrastructure from scratch, organizations can leverage CPaaS solutions to quickly and cost-effectively add communication capabilities to their existing software. According to Gartner, 90% of businesses will leverage CPaaS platforms by 2026, up from just 30% in 2022.

The applications for CPaaS platforms are wide-ranging. In financial services, organizations use CPaaS to support secure two-way communication with their customers and to send out one-time passwords. Retailers use CPaaS to send customers tailored multimedia content, promotions and product recommendations. Healthcare providers use CPaaS to support telemedicine consultations, patient monitoring, emergency response, appointment scheduling and automated reminders. And travel and hospitality organizations are enhancing the guest experience with CPaaS-powered, real-time communication and booking management.

CPaaS platforms allow companies to add new channels over time, and many organizations use the solutions to support customer messaging via services such as WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger. Increasingly, organizations also use CPaaS to support rich communication services, a next-generation messaging protocol designed to upgrade traditional SMS and MMS on mobile devices. The protocol allows for branded texting (sometimes powered by AI), and it offers advanced features such as location sharing, the ability to share high-resolution images, and interactive elements such as action buttons for bookings or payments. Together, these features have led some to call CPaaS a new “digital front door” connecting companies to their customers.

Learn how CDW can help you meet customer expectations
with innovative communications platforms.

What Is CPaaS?

As businesses race to adopt artificial intelligence solutions that cut costs and lower burdens for employees, leaders sometimes overlook the impact on their most important stakeholders: customers.

In one survey, 90% of people said they prefer interacting with a human for customer service over a chatbot, with more than half saying that humans understand their needs better and provide more thorough answers. Another survey showed that 59% of consumers feel AI has caused businesses to lose the “human element” in customer service. Gartner found that 64% of customers would prefer that companies avoid using AI for customer service altogether.

This doesn’t mean organizations should avoid using emerging technologies such as AI to streamline their customer experience operations. But it does mean they must be careful to ensure that new tools are adding to customers’ satisfaction levels rather than making their experiences more cumbersome. Often, customers become frustrated not with the use of any specific technology but by complex journeys that force them to switch channels and repeat information. By unifying communication channels, organizations can leverage emerging technologies while also fostering excellent CX.

CPaaS solutions are cloud-based platforms that allow businesses and developers to embed real-time communications features such as voice, video and text messaging directly into their own applications or websites.

Rather than building and maintaining complex communications infrastructure from scratch, organizations can leverage CPaaS solutions to quickly and cost-effectively add communication capabilities to their existing software. According to Gartner, 90% of businesses will leverage CPaaS platforms by 2026, up from just 30% in 2022.

The applications for CPaaS platforms are wide-ranging. In financial services, organizations use CPaaS to support secure two-way communication with their customers and to send out one-time passwords. Retailers use CPaaS to send customers tailored multimedia content, promotions and product recommendations. Healthcare providers use CPaaS to support telemedicine consultations, patient monitoring, emergency response, appointment scheduling and automated reminders. And travel and hospitality organizations are enhancing the guest experience with CPaaS-powered, real-time communication and booking management.

CPaaS platforms allow companies to add new channels over time, and many organizations use the solutions to support customer messaging via services such as WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger. Increasingly, organizations also use CPaaS to support rich communication services, a next-generation messaging protocol designed to upgrade traditional SMS and MMS on mobile devices. The protocol allows for branded texting (sometimes powered by AI), and it offers advanced features such as location sharing, the ability to share high-resolution images, and interactive elements such as action buttons for bookings or payments. Together, these features have led some to call CPaaS a new “digital front door” connecting companies to their customers.

Learn how CDW can help you meet customer expectations
with innovative communications platforms.

How CPaaS Aligns With AI Strategies

At many organizations, departments are under pressure from executive teams to adopt an “AI-first” approach to solving problems. CPaaS solutions incorporate AI in several ways, helping teams to meet these mandates.

Predictive Engagement

By analyzing customer data and behavior, AI-powered CPaaS platforms can predict customer needs and then automatically make the appropriate outreach via the customer’s preferred communication channel. For instance, CPaaS tools might predict which product upsells customers might be interested in or when they will need service reminders.

Real-Time Insights

The AI features of CPaaS platforms can sort through communication logs, including chats and social messages, to detect patterns and customer sentiment. These insights help managers continuously tailor training and improve the quality of their customer service teams.

Channel Orchestration

AI can power smarter call routing, allowing customers to simply say or type what they need rather than choosing from a menu. AI tools also help organizations create a comprehensive view of customer conversations across various channels and touchpoints.

How CPaaS Aligns With AI Strategies

At many organizations, departments are under pressure from executive teams to adopt an “AI-first” approach to solving problems. CPaaS solutions incorporate AI in several ways, helping teams to meet these mandates.

Predictive Engagement

By analyzing customer data and behavior, AI-powered CPaaS platforms can predict customer needs and then automatically make the appropriate outreach via the customer’s preferred communication channel. For instance, CPaaS tools might predict which product upsells customers might be interested in or when they will need service reminders.

Real-Time Insights

The AI features of CPaaS platforms can sort through communication logs, including chats and social messages, to detect patterns and customer sentiment. These insights help managers continuously tailor training and improve the quality of their customer service teams.

Channel Orchestration

AI can power smarter call routing, allowing customers to simply say or type what they need rather than choosing from a menu. AI tools also help organizations create a comprehensive view of customer conversations across various channels and touchpoints.

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CPaaS Drives Business Outcomes

As customer expectations evolve, CPaaS platforms offer a modern approach to scalable, responsive communication aligned to strategic business goals. By bringing multiple communication channels together under the umbrella of CPaaS, organizations can improve customer satisfaction, lower total costs, unify their IT ecosystems and attain business-critical insights.

Improved Customer Experience: According to PwC, 54% of U.S. consumers say CX at most companies needs improvement. What’s more, PwC notes, that 1 out of 3 customers will abandon a brand after a single negative experience. A CPaaS platform allows organizations to bring multiple communication channels together to create a unified experience for customers. Contrast this with organizations that have not implemented CPaaS: Often, these organizations use one tool for outbound sales messages, another for appointment reminders and yet another for automated customer service chat. It’s easy for customers to become overwhelmed and frustrated with so many tools, and organizations typically lack an effective way to bring together data from each channel to create a holistic picture of the customer journey.

Cost Efficiency: Almost always, more tools equal more money. In addition to ongoing licensing costs for various communication apps, organizations must also incur the hidden costs of maintenance and support. Additionally, some of these tools charge by usage, leading to another additional expense. The unified nature of CPaaS platforms means that organizations can pay one bill, helping to increase cost visibility and, in many cases, lowering the total cost of ownership. Cisco reports that more than two-thirds of businesses achieve a more than 28% revenue increase when they use CPaaS technology. And according to Custom Market Insights, cloud-based CPaaS platforms are helping businesses to lower their expenses. “The increasing adoption of cloud-based CPaaS solutions is transforming the communication landscape,” CMI notes. “Cloud-based platforms offer scalability, flexibility, and cost savings, allowing businesses to deploy and manage communication services with ease.”

IT Integration: In the past, adding a new communication channel or feature to an application almost always required a lengthy development project. But CPaaS offers ready-made building blocks, such as APIs and low-code tools, that let organizations quickly and easily add communication features such as SMS notifications to their existing IT tools. Instead of racing to adopt new tools to leverage new channels, IT teams can rely on CPaaS platforms as a bridge to connect existing applications to new communication methods. This shortens development lifecycles and empowers teams to experiment, iterate and innovate faster — allowing organizations to turn new ideas into real-world communication workflows in days rather than months. Additionally, this more unified environment reduces the management burden on internal IT teams by providing a standardized, centralized approach across all channels.

Analytics and Insights: Providing outstanding CX requires organizations to carefully balance the efficiencies of automation, the need for a human touch and the cross-channel insights that can only come from advanced analytics. Consider a typical customer journey: First, a customer sends a text message to a corporate support number. The next day, she tries interacting with the company’s support chatbot to get more insight on the issue. Later that afternoon, she calls a customer support line to escalate the case. If all of those interactions are logged in separate systems, it becomes incredibly difficult for organizations to bring that information together in a way that both tracks the individual customer journey and identifies patterns across the company. However, CPaaS platforms give organizations unified visibility into their customer communication data, making it easier to extract important insights.

Learn how CDW can help you meet customer expectations
with innovative communications platforms.

Brad Clarke

CDW Contributor

Brad Clarke is a CDW contributor.

Logan Boggs

Managing Consulting Engineer

Logan Boggs is a managing consulting engineer at CDW with over 10 years of experience in leading, designing and implementing enterprise customer experience (CX) solutions for customers across healthcare, insurance and banking verticals. Boggs focuses on tailoring emerging contact center products into holistic solutions for CDW customers within CX across multiple contact center platforms.