To make external (and internal) communications much simpler and more efficient, businesses have within the past 10 years migrated its call centers and customer service activities infrastructure to the cloud. 

This allows businesses to connect with their customers on a real-time basis much more quickly in a more immediate manner, with less technical hassles through communications platform as a service (CPaaS).

What difference does CPaaS make in business communications?

Businesses use CPaaS to set up video-enabled help desks, appointment reminders and authentication services. 

For instance, through the video-enabled help desk, customers can reach out to a customer service officer directly, seeing his/her face while communicating their needs in a real-time way, simply by clicking a button at the brand’s website page, for instance. 

Gone are the days when customers have to wait online while subsequently expending a lot of phone credits to be in touch with customer service. Internally, the CPaaS system also prevents communication breakdown by providing a centralized information flow system.

Benefits of applying CPaaS in business communications

Beyond offering the obvious benefits for both businesses and customers as outlined above, the CPaaS system also has some technological advantages. 

For starters, it boasts a comprehensive development framework for you to build real-time communications features without having to build your own. 

The infrastructure comprises software tools, standards-based application programming interfaces (APIs), sample code and pre-built applications. These functions come with comprehensive setup guidelines. 

Furthermore, the CPaaS system also offers a more personalized communication experience between businesses and their customers, which can be a competitive advantage for these businesses.

New frontiers in CPaaS use: what to expect in 2021

The mass adoption of remote working arrangements driven by the COVID-19 pandemic has led more enterprises to use CPaaS to streamline processes and communications. 

Therefore, as we enter the new year, it is likely that we see developers take the CPaaS functions and features to the next step, enhancing them with development simplification, omni-channel customer experience as well as AI and machine learning. 

The serverless system makes use of products like the Amazon Web Service Lambda or Google Cloud. By stashing the data on the cloud, users can enjoy a more rapid development and easier debugging process in an integrated development environments, allowing developers to conduct lots of activities without leaving the platform. 

The no-code system, meanwhile, will remove the hassles of having to drag and drop various visual blocks as they work. The omnichannel system, meanwhile, allows users to operate with various communication channels under a single identity, making the process of communicating with multiple channels much easier. 

Meanwhile, the adoption of AI will further refine speech recognition features by including more languages across different dialects to smooth customer service processes. 

Machine learning, meanwhile, will be used to generate a more natural-sounding human voice through modern speech synthesis using neural models offered by Google’s DeepMind or AWS. 

It will be interesting to see how, in the next several years, this enhanced CPaaS technology can help businesses leverage their global reach by paving communication roads.