Increasingly customers wish to interact with businesses in the same way they do with their friends and family, on messaging apps such as SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, or the up and coming RCS, and using rich interaction formats such as video. Correspondingly, a new category of vendors has blossomed to help companies incorporate voice, video and messaging into their communications through developer-friendly APIs and tools. Industry analysts and others recognize this space as cPaaS, short for communications platform-as-service.
The most prevalent use case has been the use of SMS and voice for 2-factor authentication, i.e. to establish the validity of contact numbers provided by customers or to authenticate them when they sign into mobile or web applications. SMS is also widely adopted to keep customers informed about account activity, transaction alerts, payment reminders and appointment notifications. With cPaaS, enterprise IT developers can easily embed SMS and voice communications into existing business processes or customer interactions, without having to deal with multiple intermediaries, buying expensive equipment or learning proprietary languages and technologies.
While developers love the simplicity of web-standard APIs, and customers appreciate timely communication, whether cPaaS goes far enough to enable truly breakthrough customer experiences needs careful deliberation.
Customers today expect the same slick experiences provided by digital natives like Uber and Airbnb from banks, retailers, utilities and other businesses they deal with. Let’s briefly consider a couple of examples of what these slick experiences might look like.
As consumers, we are quite used to receiving notifications about the status of our orders once we make a purchase from an online retailer. However, any change (such as rescheduling the delivery to a different address or date, or requesting the parcel to be dropped off with a neighbour) requires the consumer to log into a mobile or web app or speak to an agent. This is where the customer experience breaks down. Allowing the consumer to respond in natural language to the notification and enabling them to make changes can significantly reduce friction and elevate CX.
By way of another example, let’s consider a scenario where a customer has scheduled a direct debit with their bank for recurring payments such as for mortgages or rents. If account balance is insufficient in a particular month, informing the customer and asking them to log into net banking is okay, but allowing the customer to reschedule the direct debit by interacting with a bot on the same channel is what will enable a truly differentiated experience.
Clearly, it’s not sufficient to just keep customers informed; it’s about opening up multi-step interactions and orchestrating those interactions across multiple backend systems to automate fulfilment of customer requests.
A customer journey automation platform does exactly that; it not only offers all the benefits of cPaaS but also allows new experiences to be created and launched quickly and easily.
Gresham House Strategic PLC (LON:GHS) has a 42.1% ownership of IMImobile PLC, correct as of 31 January 2018 month end NAV announcement, released 1 February 2018.
