According to Gartner, 90 percent of businesses will leverage CPaaS platforms by 2026. In 2022, the figure stood at just 30 percent.
That represents an extraordinary uplift for the market. But what is driving it?
The integration of generative AI (GenAI), expansion of developer tools, and heightened focus on personalized engagement. These are all possible examples.
Yet, we wanted to dig deeper. So, for this month’s roundtable, we rounded up a panel of eight industry experts to lead us through some of the most disruptive market trends. They are:
- Mauro Carobene, Head of Customer Interactions Suite at Tata Communications
- Anthony Bartolo, Chief Operating Officer at Bandwidth
- Ivan Ostojić, Chief Business Officer at Infobip
- Anna Jäger, Vice President Marketing EMEA at Sinch
- Seth Gilpin, Director of Product Marketing at Telesign
- David Casem, CEO of Telnyx
- Carina Kern, Principal Product Marketing Manager for Communications at Twilio
- Vikram Khandpur, SVP, CPaaS Products and Developer Experience at Vonage
In addition to market trends, our panelists discuss how the tech is enabling industry-specific CX innovation below – alongside some of the differentiators to look out for within CPaaS platforms.
CPaaS Market Trends
Rich Conversational Channels
Ostojić: Infobip just revealed its 2024 Messaging Trends Report, and, as part of this report, we highlighted how many complete customer journeys are taking place on rich conversational channels.
Customers can now seamlessly progress through the various stages of purchase within a single conversational thread on a chat app or rich communications services (RCS), for instance.
Another essential trend to spotlight is the emergence of GenAI as a key tool to enable better conversational experiences since it can replicate human conversation by recognizing individual words, context, and intent.
The CPaaS industry is well positioned to capitalize on GenAI appliances since GenAI has a natural fit in different channels and enables next-level communications between businesses and consumers.
AI Everywhere
Carobene: AI is revolutionizing customer engagement within CPaaS ecosystems in several key ways:
- Hyper-Personalization/Individualization: Leveraging AI, businesses can predict customer needs, curate content tailored to individual preferences, and facilitate brand interactions at the customer’s convenience and on their preferred communication channel.
- Contextual Engagement: Bots provide timely and relevant responses to customer queries, ensuring first contact resolution (FCR) and swift service delivery.
- Real-Time Insights: CPaaS platforms, augmented with AI, often provide analytics capabilities – such as sentiment analysis during live interactions and actionable recommendations – to improve customer satisfaction scores.
- Channel Orchestration: AI empowers organizations to create a comprehensive view of customer conversations, ensuring consistent communication across channels and touchpoints.
Heightened Interoperability
Bartolo: There’s an old saying that the only sure things in life are death and taxes. If you’re an enterprise CIO, you can add “integrations” to the list.
CIOs want the best solutions for UC, CC, AI, and fraud prevention – but they want interoperability so they’re not locked into a single vendor. And they can’t risk breaking something on their way to the cloud. CPaaS adoption will accelerate as vendors show they can solve this integration challenge.
At Bandwidth, we believe we have an elegant solution with our new Maestro platform.
The most important integrations are available out of the box with Maestro. This speeds up time to value and reduces development time from months to hours while giving future flexibility to switch between solutions.
By solving the integration headache, CIOs are free to focus on delighting their customers with a better CX. Come to think of it, maybe there are only two sure things in life after all!
Next-Level Accessibility
Jäger: Generative AI will likely enable access to CPaaS APIs for more businesses in 2024.
Until today, there’s been a barrier for smaller companies to benefit from the cost advantage and reach of CPaaS.
AI will allow these companies to create customized software to solve their unique challenges at a lower cost. This opens up new sales markets for CPaaS players.
Channel Mix Changes
Gilpin: Over the next five years, OTT channels – like WhatsApp, Viber, and RCS – will become a staple of business communication.
From rising costs and SMS vulnerabilities to OTT end-user adoption and feature-rich experiences – there’s a growing need for businesses to build new channels into their CPaaS stacks.
In many markets outside the United States, like Latin America and Southeast Asia, WhatsApp is…
Read More: CPaaS Platforms: Trends, Industries, and Differentiators