As consumers, we have all experienced the convenience and instant gratification that digital-native businesses offer. Through connected experiences, they are setting the customer experience (CX) benchmark against which other businesses are measured.
In a CX marathon, enterprises are playing catch up and are struggling to meet customer expectations for deeper engagement over the communications channels of their preference. Customers today not only want proactive and personalized interactions, but also experiences that maintain context over multiple channels and options for intelligent self-service. If an enterprise doesn’t meet these expectations, its customers will simply move on to a competitor that does. In fact, over 50% of consumers will abandon a company after 2 or more negative interactions.
This is where we step in – CX is a core part of the Webex strategy, which is focused on powering remarkable customer experiences in a multi-channel world. Through applications for areas such as contact center, collaboration, and experience management to our enterprise CPaaS platform, we give large organizations the tools they need to rapidly leverage the capabilities of cloud communications to create customer engagement applications.
Enterprises are embracing Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) to transform how they engage and serve their customers. Offering flexibility and agility, CPaaS provides a cloud-based layer for embedding communication capabilities, such as voice, SMS, digital messaging, and video into customer-facing and partner applications using APIs and Software Developer Kits (SDKs).
Propelled recently by the pandemic, Gartner reports in their 2021 Market Guide for CPaaS that the market has grown by at least 30% over the past five years. This upward trend is expected to continue with IDC forecasting that worldwide market spend will reach $21.7 billion by 2025. While messaging and voice will continue for now as CPaaS’s most popular APIs, the adoption of new digital channels such as WhatsApp and Apple Business Chat, along with video, represent significant areas for growth.
With such a positive market outlook, there can be little doubt that enterprises recognize the opportunity to improve their digital competitiveness using CPaaS to enable contactless engagement and processes that drive business efficiencies.
Webex CPaaS, primarily built from the existing imiconnect platform, is tailored exclusively to the needs of the enterprise, and is used today by large global enterprises to power billions of customer interactions. Through a central cloud communications platform, we provide everything required to rapidly build applications that connect communication channels with backend systems to deliver great customer experiences.
Enterprise IT and developers can take advantage of an extensive portfolio of APIs, low-code tools, out-the-box controls, and prebuilt functionality to design smarter interactions and frictionless experiences across multiple channels, without having to re-engineer or make significant investments into existing or new back-end systems.
imiconnect extends CPaaS beyond just sending and receiving messages, enabling enterprises to orchestrate connected journeys that deliver tangible outcomes for customers, when and where they need them. It does this by enabling enterprises to effortlessly manage customer profiles to contextualize and personalize interactions, seamlessly integrate existing systems to automate journeys end-to-end and understand customer intent through natural language processing.
Beyond building applications and managing interactions, imiconnect offers the SLAs and controls enterprises need for business-critical use cases that require scalability, compliance, and reliability.
We are excited to establish Webex as a leading CPaaS provider that enables enterprises to leverage all communication channels and business systems to create better customer and employee experiences.
Webex will continue to invest and build features to offer more value to enterprises through the imiconnect CPaaS platform. Demonstrating our commitment to innovation, we are pleased to now be offering an enterprise developer sandbox and Video API capability to our enterprise customers.
We know that developers and product teams are often brought ideas that need to be quickly evaluated to determine if they work or need further refinement. Therefore, we are excited to announce the launch of the enterprise developer sandbox where we make it even easier to prototype customer journeys before upgrading to the full imiconnect platform.
The sandbox provides enterprise developers with access to the most popular messaging channels including SMS, voice, and WhatsApp, for both inbound and outbound messaging. Each of these channels is coupled with quick-start information such as sample code, postman collections, and SDKs, to help developers get started.
The enterprise developer sandbox allows developers and IT users to experience the power of the imiconnect platform for creating, testing, deploying, and analyzing customer engagement applications. They can test key tools including a flow builder, debugging tools, pre-built system integrations, and analytics.
For more information and details on how to sign-up to the enterprise developer sandbox, click here.
Video is currently one of the most exciting opportunities in CPaaS, continuing to gain significant traction since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic with the need to provide more human interactions and streamline digital processes. Forbes reports that 55% of consumers have used video to connect with businesses and service providers.
When enterprises bring video into their CX strategy, they need confidence that they can scale as demand grows while guaranteeing a high-quality experience. That’s why we are pleased to announce we are combining Webex’s proven video architecture that already powers billions of minutes every year with the power of the imiconnect platform to create a Video API and SDK.
Through the imiconnect platform, enterprise developers can use the API and SDK to create richer video experiences across a range of use cases such as telehealth, education, gaming, social, and augmented reality. They can leverage a wide range of building blocks for session controls, simulcast, and defining 1:1 video experiences that take advantage of AI and machine learning tools to deliver interactions as good as they would be in person.
This is just the first step, and in the future, we will add more capabilities for group calling, recording, and much more as part of the product’s roadmap.
To register interest, visit the Video as a Service web page.
Learn more about enterprise CPaaS
Find out more about enterprise CPaaS by visiting our CPaaS webpage
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