Communications Platform as a service trend to look out for

CPaaS trends

There is no doubt that CPaaS is growing rapidly, and while still small, it is a highly supported industry. Many of the vendors may still be offering the phone call options but this is liable to change according to how customers communicate. This change will make CPaaS an interesting platform to watch over the year.

CPaaS for business

The powerful API and programming capabilities of CPaaS are transforming application development and deployment. With the introduction of new drag and drop tools, the creation of applications is no longer dependent on markup language programming skills.

Hosted CPaaS services offered by service providers may open up new pay-as-you-go affordability to the market. You should expect to see businesses adopt CPaaS more and more to improve their customer care experience using SMS, voice, and video messaging.

Serverless compute experiences

One of the technology trends to watch for CPaaS is serverless models of computing. It is being used already by companies such as AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Google’s Cloud Functions, and Apache’s OpenWhisk.

This still is not as prevalent in CPaaS yet, as developers have to develop, maintain, and operate their own servers which communicate with the CPaaS vendor’s infrastructure. However, signs of serverless computing are being seen. The demand for a serverless model is growing which means that it may become part of the norm for CPaaS developers.

Omnichannel

SMS services are a highly effective way of reaching your audience, but sometimes SMS is simply not enough. Businesses should strive to include other channels as a means to communicate with their clients and customers. This is known as omnichannel communication.

Channels should include social media platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp, and other popular messaging apps. To support the channel, one would need to integrate with it, and decide which channel would best suit which audience. Omnichannel would enable developers and businesses to communicate with customers on the customer’s preferred channel.

Machine learning

Introducing machine learning to CPaaS vendors would mean that they are able to research data and use this to their advantage. Many vendors already offer well-functioning software that sends out generic messages that can be tweaked, but with the innovations in machine learning, more can be done.

CPaaS vendors can look into what more they can offer their customers other than simply optimizing it. Personalized messages could be created based on data gathered from customers’ communications, and the use of speech to text, text to speech, and translation could also be included. The inclusion of machine learning will help to improve networks and offer better services.

IoT and CPaaS intersect

Companies such as Accenture have long been investigating combining IoT and CPaaS capabilities in their communications offerings. Their IoT efforts included Connected Transport, Connected Spaces, Connected Operations, Connected Health, and Connected Commerce which formed their "Connected Platforms as a Service" offerings.

With the intersection of IoT and CPaaS, complex interactions between devices and other web services could be developed. One example is the City Platform as a Service which has been developed by Europe and Japan. This smart city innovation aims to gather data using IoT and sensor data, open government data, social media, and other third-party data providers in order to provide information that could lead to the creation of new services and applications.

Chatbots

Chatbots are rising steadily in popularity with many businesses, and are ideal for communications platform vendors. This is because chatbots are all about communication. The vendors enabling omnichannel offerings are, in effect, creating space for bots to be created across channels.

For this integration to fully work, however, you would need to enable conversational interfaces and ease the part of the packaging for the bots for the various channels. Chatbots and AI go hand-in-hand, and Clickatell Touch combines AI with machine learning, workflow automation, and human-in-the-loop for superior customer service. Interactions will be automated by using Touch, and your call-center agents will be able to deal with multiple interactions at once. Innovations such as this help to boost the CPaaS industry immensely, from a telecoms-focused industry to a global player.

In conclusion

This year is deemed to be an exciting one for technology on the whole, with more sectors integrating to bring about change and unique services. Communications Platform as a Service is likely to grow steadily, with some interesting trends bringing it to the forefront of business and retail communication strategies. Read more about our CPaaS offerings, Clickatell Platform, and Touch for more insights into the latest trends.