6 CPaaS trends shaping the future of customer communication in 2024 and beyond

The CPaaS market is growing. But what is driving growth? Often, it is businesses expanding their digital DNA alongside using CPaaS for customer engagement and driving business efficiencies. 

Gartner® forecasts that “by 2028, 90% of global enterprises will leverage communications platform as a service (CPaaS) to operationalize CX and engagement, up from 50% in 2023.” 

Generally, CPaaS is often first adopted by a single business unit for a specific reason, such as notifications or one-time passwords. Other business units then adopt CPaaS as they see value across areas like marketing campaigns, customer services, and commerce. 

More broadly, Gartner® reports that “while foundational SMS and voice retain their dominance in the communications channels used for CPaaS, enterprises are also focused on extending their communications capabilities to deliver personalized and contextual experiences”. WhatsApp, Video, and Email are the latest growth engines. More nascent channels like Apple Business Messages,  RCS Business Messaging, Messenger, and Zalo will fuel future growth. 

Recent research from Infobip supports this. In our latest Messaging Trends Report, we analyzed over 473 billion communication interactions on our platform from 2023. We found that chat apps such as WhatsApp are becoming crucial channels for customer communications, demonstrating the growing importance of conversational experiences.  

The data revealed a 62% increase in WhatsApp interactions in 2023 compared to the same period in 2022. WhatsApp is not the only channel enabling brands to explore conversational marketing use cases. We are seeing significant increases in the use of other messaging channels, including Telegram, Line, Viber, and Messenger.  

While newer channels are gaining momentum, the data shows that SMS is still important for business communication. However, its usage patterns are changing. We are seeing it being used more in conjunction with chat apps. 

Here are the six trends businesses must consider when investing and implementing CPaaS solutions. 

Advanced conversational messaging channels such as WhatsApp, RCS, Apple Business Messages, Messenger, and Zalo support a mix of rich communications technologies, including videos, carousels, branding, and geolocation. 

These channels also support payments by integrating third-party payment provider gateways or through native capabilities. 

CPaaS providers use these rich communications technologies in advanced messaging channels to create an end-to-end customer journey from marketing and acquisition to onboarding, payments, and customer support. 

In effect, communications platforms use advanced messaging channels to support conversational “everything”, where consumers get a better experience, and businesses see superior results. 

By creating richer and more proactive experiences, we expect to see two-way conversations scale across the entire customer journey. This year, we will see greater app-like experiences in chat apps. For instance, Infobip developed an AI-powered chatbot for Uber that enables its customers to order a ride through WhatsApp, creating a seamless booking experience. 

The rise of generative AI tools represents one of the most pivotal trends in CPaaS. It is revolutionizing chatbots, making them more intelligent and capable. 

“By 2028, 80% of enterprises using CPaaS for operationalizing experiences for customer experience (CX) will use generative AI (GenAI)-based conversational AI capabilities, up from 20% today” as Gartner® notes. 

More advanced chatbots enable brands to enhance marketing and sales automation. Such chatbots answer product or pricing questions, schedule deliveries, take payments, and even speak in the customer’s language of emojis and gifs—all within a customer’s favorite channel. 

Infobip is already seeing businesses and brands creating and deploying chatbots to bring a new level of automation, speed, and availability. Such intelligent virtual assistants help scale customer service, drive efficiencies, and enable businesses to upsell and cross-sell. 

Omnichannel communications enable conversations across multiple channels while maintaining context across those channels. CPaaS platforms, through visual builders and conversational APIs, empower businesses to create interconnected, customer-centric communication strategies. 

Visual builders enable both technical and non-technical users to design and deploy omnichannel experiences without writing a single line of code.  

Conversational APIs, on the other hand, support one “inbox” functionality, where there is a memory of conversations across channels. This “single source of truth” ensures agents have complete visibility into the customer’s history, regardless of the channel they choose to use.  

Infobip’s comprehensive suite of APIs provides seamless integration with various communication channels, allowing for a truly unified customer inbox. 

While customer relationship management (CRM) has often been the system of record, it has several weaknesses. CRM data is static and misses the wealth of information in other repositories such as email, calendars, eCommerce, websites, social media, public records, messaging channels, and Enterprise Resource Planning.  

On the other hand, Customer Data Platforms (CDP) provide organizations with a deep, real-time understanding of customers. 

CDP collects data from these repositories to become a centralized customer behavior hub. Therefore, CDP can predict customer buying preferences, value, brand loyalty, sentiment, unmet needs, and frustrations. 

Some CPaaS providers have built CDP capabilities, including Infobip, while others offer connections to third-party customer data platforms. 

For instance, Infobip’s customer data platform, People CDP, helps businesses and brands connect online and offline customer data to unlock actionable insights, make more informed decisions, and deliver a great customer experience. 

CPaaS providers are expanding systems integrator, value-added reseller, and delivery and developer partnerships to cater to small and medium-sized business customers alongside brick-and-mortar enterprises building capabilities. 

Partners also fill voids outside North America and Europe for local-global reach and delivery capabilities. Such partners offer an understanding of local regulations, nuances, and languages of individual markets. 

Addressing the demand for digital engagement using CPaaS by including developers should also be key in the partner selection process. 

In addition, partners bring capability experiences in areas such as customer experience, telehealth, campaign management, and eCommerce. 

Along with that addressing the demand for digital engagement using CPaaS by including developers should be key in the partner selection process.

Gartner® points out that “partnerships at channel/agent, delivery, and integration levels deepened as CPaaS shifted from delivering simple use cases to more complex use cases in different areas of the enterprise (e.g., from marketing to customer services or HR applications).” 

Infobip has long valued its partnerships. Our partners include other technology firms, telecom companies, B2B startups, and consulting and services firms. 

As the one communications platform for every platform, we’re the partner of choice for businesses such as Google, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, and Vodafone, to name a few. 

Moreover, our Partner Connect Program ensures we’re by our partners’ side regardless of task. From integration to business planning and identifying opportunities to approaching clients and implementing use cases, we help our partners create innovative solutions that drive new revenue streams. 

Gartner® reports that “CPaaS vendors have expanded their developer toolsets and enhanced their developer relations to extend into CCaaS, CDP, conversational artificial intelligence (CAI), and ERP”.  

CCaaS platforms start with voice but are now adding SMS, advanced messaging, social media channels, and chatbots for self-service. 

Digital channel vendors start with SMS, chat, and messaging. They then add voice. 

Many CRM and CPaaS providers seek to add similar ingredients to deliver engaging customer experiences over many channels, complemented with AI. 

AI is common to all platforms with the objective of automation, reducing costs, and improving customer experience. 

We think Infobip is leading the way with greater convergence. We offer CPaaS alongside CCaaS as well as a CDP, among many other core services.    

It is another example of how we continue to innovate and co-create with our clients and partners to ensure we are the one communication platform for every platform.

Customer experience can make or break a business or brand.

So, to deliver that great experience, the CPaaS market and providers are evolving rapidly.

Platforms are innovating. They are integrating new technologies and channels to meet customer needs and deliver more conversational experiences. 

With such rapid development, it is little wonder the market will grow in the years ahead.

But with such rapid development, and against an increasingly cost-conscious environment, businesses and brands must ensure they choose a composable tech platform that reduces implementation time and delivers transformation more quickly.  

Such interoperable solutions enable organizations to quickly integrate new capabilities through easy integration, increasing time to impact while reducing infrastructure costs and implementation timeline.

Source: Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Communications Platform as a Service, Lisa Unden-Farboud, Ajit Patankar, Pankil Sheth, Brian Doherty, 24 June 2024 

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