CPaaS In Customer Experience: Examples, Trends, & Providers

Gartner recently released its inaugural Magic Quadrant for CPaaS – a sign of the technology’s growing enterprise significance.

Inside, the analyst estimated that - by 2026 - 90 percent of businesses will leverage CPaaS platforms, up from 30 percent in 2022.

From there, Gartner isolated and evaluated many of the most prominent CPaaS providers pushing this trend forward.

Five of the best-performing (in alphabetical order) include: Bandwidth, Cisco, Infobip, Sinch, & Twilio.

Each has put forward a specialist spokesperson for our roundtable:

• Ankush Gangwani, Vice President of Enterprise at Bandwidth
• Jay Patel, Vice President & General Manager of Cisco's Webex CPaaS Solutions
• Ivan Ostojić, Chief Business Officer at Infobip
• Lotta Forså, Customer and Partner Marketing Lead EMEA at Sinch
• Sam Richardson, CX Consultant at Twilio

Below, these experts share CX success stories, critical industry trends, and further insight into how their business supports its CPaaS clients.

Share a CPaaS In Customer Experience Success Story (The Examples)

A U.S. Retailer Simplifies Its Prescription Refill Processes

Patel: A large U.S. retailer has multiple initiatives running on the Webex CPaaS platform, including its "Rx" refill prescription journey, which is part of a broader customer experience program.

In doing so, it has expanded its existing messaging program to provide an array of prescription-related messages using smarter, richer channels such as Rich Communication Services (RCS) chats.

The upgrade from SMS text messaging communication to RCS chats helped the company improve Rx refill rates and opt-in rates, decrease abandoned prescription rates, and resulted in improved customer health benefits and retention.

The retailer also now has programs for photo appointment reminders, online purchase information, marketing, and two-factor authentication (2FA).

The company's latest loyalty program launch provides customers a personalized experience and an easier way to save, shop, and stay well by sending out notifications with offers, deals, and cart reminder texts.

Marks & Spencer Connects Its Physical and Digital Experience

Richardson: M&S wanted to modernize their customers' shopping experiences and offer more ways for them to speak with customer service and resolve queries quickly.

Yet, it had a considerable roadblock: siloed data with no seamless way to connect flows across stores, departments, and sales.

Turning to Twilio, M&S implemented natural language processing (NLP) within its stores’ estates to power the automation of the existing switchboard.

The other was to cut out the contact center IVR and remove the associated complexity.

As a result, M&S achieved many metric gains, including average handling time (AHT) reductions of ten seconds.

Yet, most critically – as per M&S – a CPaaS foundation allowed it to: "Build like a start-up and scale like an enterprise."

Uber Builds New Experience Across Voice, SMS, & WhatsApp

Ostojić: Infobip and Uber first collaborated in 2014 on SMS and voice, developing voice number masking solutions and ensuring that rider/driver information remains protected.

After leveraging the CPaaS platform, Uber users’ personal information was protected whenever they engaged in calls with other passengers and drivers.

More recently, Uber developed a chatbot, enabling customers to order rides via WhatsApp, creating a seamless booking experience, and improving user engagement.

Indeed, the business built and deployed the chatbot on the WhatsApp for Business platform using Infobip's SaaS chatbot building solution, 'Answers.'

Now, "the WhatsApp to Ride (WA2R) experience" is available for Uber riders across Delhi-NCR, one of Uber’s top cities globally by volume.

Harrods Creates 360° Customer Profiles

Forså: Tech advancements, changing consumer expectations, and fierce market competition disrupted the more traditional methods that once fueled Harrods’ success.

Recognizing this, the luxury retailer kickstarted a digital transformation journey in 2020 to survive and thrive in a rapidly evolving environment.

That started by creating a single view of the customer for various business teams - covering customer service, CRM, and analytics and insights - to enable data-driven CX decisions.

By doing so, Harrods could identify and prioritize its most loyal customers.

From there, the retail giant sought to empower business teams with tools to more innovatively engage these customers while delivering personalized communications and discounts.

Sinch's CPaaS platform enabled this process and allowed customers to choose their preferred engagement channel via the Sinch platform. That allows conversational context to flow into Harrods' IT environment and systems.

Harrods now possesses a holistic 360° customer profile, offering a single view of each customer's interactions across all online and in-store touchpoints.

A U.S. Bank Leverages Cross-Channel Biometric Authentication and Anti-Fraud Tech

Gangwani: A large bank – and a prominent issuer of Visa and Mastercard in the U.S. - chose Bandwidth to move its contact center to the cloud and support its vast credit card services operation.

Bandwidth provided voice biometric authentication and anti-fraud technology built into its cloud communications network to solve a critical software integration gap.

The solutions eliminated extra development cycles and vendor contracts for the bank, accelerating project completion and time-to-value.

In addition, the voice fidelity and call metadata made possible by Bandwidth’s all-IP network gave the bank future options to leverage emerging AI technologies for additional CX benefits.

The result: the bank delivers a better customer and agent experience through faster call resolution, quicker identity verification, better call clarity, and higher network uptime.

Pinpoint a CPaaS Trend Taking Over the CX Space (The Trends)

Conversational Messaging

Patel: Conversational messaging over digital channels is powering the CPaaS boom.

Within a single, centralized CPaaS platform, digital channels now support a host of functionalities such as conversational bots, video, carousels, branding, geolocation, and QR codes, alongside supporting payments.

These channels enable the creation of seamless, end-to-end customer journeys for marketing, customer acquisition, onboarding, customer support, eCommerce, transactions, and more.

AI integrations will also become increasingly central in enabling conversational messaging through simple automation and orchestration of information and context between channels.

In turn, this will unlock quicker speed to market and the more efficient use of resources to develop journeys through capabilities such as auto-generated code, training data generation for bots, and text summarization.

Viewing video as an opportunity, Webex recently unveiled personalized AI video generation. This AI-powered feature enables organizations to leverage their existing customer journeys in Webex Connect and overlay AI to produce personalized videos at scale.

Thanks to AI’s ability to generate talking-head videos quickly, expect greater use of such personalized video content in real-time customer communications to better tailor engagement.

Composable Customer Experiences

Richardson:

Communication and collaboration have taken on added meaning and importance for businesses in recent years, given global events.

Workforces are more flexible, digitally-enabled, and location-agnostic than ever before, leading to heightened demand for composable platforms.

For CPaaS vendors, the greater the degree of customizability and additional services they can offer alongside their core platform or technology, the better they can meet this demand.