Communications is rapidly evolving in the Asia Pacific region. The decline in traditional voice calls is giving way to various other communication channels, from SMS to in-app chat, social media apps and in-app voice calls powered by chat and voice bots. Millennials and digital natives are accustomed to mobile-first, cloud-enabled technologies. With about 2.4 billion smartphone users in the region, these technologies are central to how consumers are communicating.
With numerous channels (voice, video, social and chat) and greater demand for real-time interaction via these preferred channels, businesses struggle to deliver seamless and timely contextual customer service.
Communications Platform-as-a-Service (CPaaS), cloud-based platforms that enable developers to embed voice, video, chat and messaging services within their applications through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), is helping businesses address the growing opportunities arising from people communicating across different channels.
These programmable communications via APIs enable businesses to connect with consumers wherever they feel most comfortable, creating more personalized and customized connections that make a lasting and more memorable customer experience. Gartner anticipates that the global CPaaS market will grow at around 50% to 2021, to reach annual revenues of around US$4.6 billion.
Enhancing customer experience
Today’s customer might use an array of voice, video or text-based mediums. CPaaS enables omni-channel, contextual customer experience, helping brands deliver seamless communications over a single platform.
Grab, Southeast Asia’s ride-hailing giant, needed a way to scale its user communication process. However, non-reliable carrier infrastructure in many of its geographies meant that some text messages and calls were not being delivered, disrupting the customer sign-up process. To overcome these challenges, Grab utilized a cloud communication platform to ensure that messages, through SMS and Voice APIs, were delivered via real-time, regardless of its customer’s location.
Customers also tend to switch channels while interacting with a company, losing crucial context about their request or issue in the process. For instance, a customer may start the communications on a messaging app and then be led to the company’s customer service phone extension.
Often, the customer would have to explain the whole story from scratch at each new channel. This can cause friction within the customer experience. In other cases, it may be more convenient to transition the customer from a voice call to a messaging app to complete certain functions such as an address change, which can be achieved without losing the context.
Communications APIs allow crucial information to be retained regardless of the channel in which a conversation takes place or where it heads next. This also provides access to insights like a customer’s intent, physical location and social presence, helping brands better understand their customer’s needs.
Optimising marketing campaigns
With CPaaS, marketing teams can create holistic, multi-channel campaigns, improving customer engagement. Rather than just an email, marketers can send follow-up SMS messages (including a discount code, for example) or voice calls as appropriate.
A study states that companies with a strong omnichannel marketing strategy retained on average 89% of their customers and witnessed a 9.5% year-on-year revenue growth.
This also allows businesses to track and analyse campaigns on a single platform. Communications APIs, or CPaaS, enable businesses to automatically conduct customer surveys at specific points in the customer journey. For instance, after a customer first engages with the business or makes a purchase. Zalora’s usage of SMS API to boost marketing and transactions led to consistently higher mobile user acquisition, increased traffic to its e-commerce and m-commerce sites and a decrease in overall customer service costs.
Enabling easy verification
Validating genuine customers is easy with cloud-based APIs. Beyond the usual username and password process, business can use APIs to implement Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) which provides an additional layer of verification.
APIs can enable, verification by sending users a one-time password over another channel, like voice or SMS. In conjunction with static passwords, phone verification can be used to provide an additional layer of security.
This has helped ride-hailing companies like Grab mitigate the number of unauthorised rider and driver app downloads and account activations.
2FA is also beneficial for financial applications to place additional security measures against the transfer of money and other online services. For instance, a user wanting to apply for a new credit card may be asked to submit all docs (including ID) via a social messaging app. The company then sends a link to do a live video verification with facial recognition which is enabled via the API. The agent can then verify the user’s authenticity on the spot and process the card right away.
Winning at customer service
Businesses must be equipped with omni-channel capabilities in order to effectively engage with their customers on their preferred channels. Failing to do so will mean missing out on one of the most powerful methods available for forging meaningful and lasting customer relationships. CPaaS is enabling businesses to enhance customer experience and in doing so, winning and keeping customer loyalty in an increasingly dynamic market.
