CPaaS or Communications Platform as a Service, represents the future of mobile communications and is something that we’re passionate about at GMS. CPaaS solutions enable enterprises to engage with their customers on their preferred channels, enhancing the customer experience, building brand loyalty, and increasing retention and conversion. Over the last few months, we’ve published several articles on what CPaaS can do for brands and enterprises. This month, we look at how MNOs can take advantage of the CPaaS revolution.
The changing face of messaging
One of the biggest threats to A2P SMS revenue is the rise of the OTT messenger. The increasing usage of OTTs like Viber and WhatsApp has led to a significant dip in P2P SMS revenues over the past decade. This study from Statista shows that 49 billion SMS were sent in the UK in 2020 — a sharp contrast to the 145 billion SMS sent in 2013. OTT messengers might have had a role to play. In 2013, WhatsApp had 200 million users, but it now has roughly 2 billion.
A2P SMS has definitely received a boost in usage with the rise of one-time passwords. However, we’re still seeing more and more businesses supplement or even replace traditional SMS communication with OTT messengers. Usually, OTT messaging will cut MNOs out of the loop, but there’s one way that MNOs can take advantage of the rise of OTT — CPaaS. By offering a CPaaS solution to their enterprise clients, MNOs can get revenue from OTT messages sent as well as the A2P SMS revenue they already receive.
The CPaaS advantage for MNOs
Offering a CPaaS Solution to your enterprise clients allows you to leverage the messaging market as never before. But the increased revenue from the CPaaS subscription paid by enterprise clients isn’t the only advantage you’ll gain. There’s also:
Increased A2P traffic — CPaaS solutions often increase the use of A2P SMS, for many different reasons. For example, look at fallback options, which are a huge selling point for CPaaS. If you try to send an OTT message using a CPaaS service and it isn’t delivered, then it can fall back on more reliable channels like SMS automatically. Where before an enterprise client might have tried OTT and then just written off any undelivered messages, now an A2P SMS is sent in its place — creating revenue for MNOs — and this is just one way that A2P volume is stimulated with CPaaS!
Develop a closer relationship with enterprises — Offering a CPaaS solution to your enterprise clients will bring you closer to them. Rather than having just a transactional relationship, where they pay for what they use in terms of network traffic, you’ll be building a long-term relationship with your clients using a subscription service business model.
Raise customer satisfaction — CPaaS solutions allow your enterprise clients to provide their customers with a better customer experience, and the same is true for MNOs who provide CPaaS to enterprises. Offering your customers a comprehensive messaging solution will often solve their issues, enabling them to move from using multiple different services and software to using a single login service for all their communications needs. This creates an improved customer experience for your enterprise clients too.
Why should enterprises embrace CPaaS?
What are the some of the headline features offered by a CPaaS solution that will entice your clients to sign up?
Talk to customers where they are — with multiple channels, your enterprise customers are able to use their customer’s preferred messaging apps with ease. Combine this with the fallback options we discussed earlier, and your customers can be sure that their messages will always be delivered.
Start a conversation — with CPaaS, you can have a conversation with customers using two-way messaging. Many millennials and younger people much prefer text chat for their customer service to phone calls, so offering this option will make them happy and increase their loyalty to your brand.
Improve customer experience — CPaaS solutions give brands the ability to talk with customers using two-way messaging, via their customer’s preferred channel. Fallback options ensure they never miss an important message. This is a massive improvement to customer experience, and as we’ve seen earlier, improved customer experience will mean you can charge more for your services.
Save time, money, and resources — by implementing a pre-built CPaaS solution, brands will save time and development resource. But this isn’t the only time saving they will see. They can use just the CPaaS platform for their whole messaging campaign. No need to rebuild the whole campaign from scratch every time in a different piece of software to use a different channel.
Enterprise Business Director, GMS
A white-labelled CPaaS solution such as GMS’ Business Communication Platform opens a whole new world for MNOs, allowing them to tap into additional A2P revenue streams by adding OTTs to their messaging portfolios.
Somebody already invented the wheel…
…so there’s no need to do it again. We have talked a little about how useful a CPaaS service can be to your business, opening up new avenues to revenue that you would have missed. But building your own CPaaS solution will take time and money, and if you have been persuaded by this article you would like to get started right away. In cases like this you can seek out a ready-made solution, ideally one you can white label as your own product. This way you get to present to all of your clients a finished CPaaS solution without spending any of the time and money you would need to invest to develop your own.
The Rising Tide
One of the best ways to grow a B2B business is to provide new or better services to your clients. With a CPaaS solution, enterprises are able to offer a better customer experience, improve their relationships with their customers and in many cases, this will lead to increased revenue. After all, research from Invesp shows that 59% of shoppers prefer to buy new products from the brands they love.
As the old saying goes, the rising tide lifts all boats. Helping your clients grow their business will, in turn, help grow yours. If they have more satisfied customers, then that brings more business which brings more opportunities for cross-selling and referrals, and this could all lead to an increased demand for messaging. If this is something you’d be interested in, then you should speak to our experts today.