How CPaaS is transforming customer engagement, one conversation at a time

Couldn’t make it to our speaking session at this year’s Enterprise Connect? Not a problem! We’ve gathered all the main highlights of this inspiring discussion between our CEO Oscar Werner, Ed O’Hara, President of Sinch Voice, Will Conway, President of Sinch Developer and Email, and Courtney Munroe, Vice President of Worldwide Telecommunications Research at IDC.

So what’s it all about? Well, there’s a new tech giant in town. Sinch is now the world’s leading customer engagement platform, born from the $3B worth of acquisitions of voice giant Inteliquent and email delivery leader Pathwire. That means businesses can now engage any customer on the planet seamlessly across messaging, email, voice, and video – with supreme quality and on a global scale.

Read on and discover how to address shifting customer expectations and engagement trends and learn how to evolve your digital infrastructure.

As stated by IDC’s VP of Research Courtney Munroe at the opening of our speaking session: the concept of digital transformation might sound like a thing of the past. But does the process ever end? What’s next?

No matter how far they’ve come in their digital transformation journey, businesses need to make sure they’re managing their digital infrastructure in an agile and innovative way that allows them to adjust to ever-evolving customer expectations and engagement patterns.

IDC predicts that customer engagement should represent about 50% of all spending on digital infrastructure over the next five years. And it’s no wonder why considering that consumers nowadays use four different channels to communicate on average; and expect to interact with brands in real-time, on their own terms. This is having and will continue to have a massive impact on the way companies do business and engage with their audience.

So how can businesses get started with always-on two-way customer conversations, on any channel – and at scale? Well, that’s where technology like CPaaS comes in handy.

Long gone are the days when people were OK choosing between holding in a call center queue forever or emailing customer support and waiting days to get questions answered. Fortunately, gone too are the days when businesses had to spend a lot of time, effort, and money creating and evolving complex legacy communications infrastructure or stitching together countless solutions to accommodate customer channel preferences.

CPaaS takes the headache out of the picture and offers businesses the flexibility to create customized applications that integrate seamlessly with their other martech tools – quickly and easily! That means brands can finally bridge the gap between customer expectations for flawless, always-on interactions on their favorite channels and the experiences they can realistically deliver.

In fact, research commissioned by Sinch with nearly 400 enterprises and presented in a recent IDC White Paper showed that:

In a nutshell, this means that two-way customer engagement is the key to a better digital CX. One that drives long-term customer loyalty and improves your bottom line – and CPaaS is how brands can make it happen.

“The CPaaS market has shown tremendous growth over the last few years and will continue to grow to address shifting customer expectations and ways of engaging,” according to Munroe. More specifically, CPaaS is expected to generate more than 20 billion dollars in revenue by 2025 and over 100 billion dollars spent by enterprises in the next 5 years or so!

Of course, with such dizzying growth, there are now countless providers on the market – or are there? How do you find a reliable CPaaS partner?

As explained by Courtney Munroe at Enterprise Connect, when it comes to CPaaS, experience is of the essence, as are a global network and direct connections with mobile operators worldwide. Why? Because this is what ensures that communications happen – that messages get delivered, that emails reach customer inboxes, and that calls are connected with the best voice quality. Consistently, reliably, and securely.

With this in mind, there are only a few solid options.

Another important thing to consider is a provider’s know-how in regulatory issues. Peace of mind is key when it comes to compliance, no matter where your audience may be.

Also, spare a thought for how easy it will be to actually work with a provider? What’s the support network like? What might the hidden costs be?

We’ve compiled everything you need to look out for in a CPaaS provider into a handy checklist. Take a look, and choose with confidence!

During this session, our CEO Oscar Werner talked about Sinch’s vision of “making every business interaction easy to help enterprises reach their goals, whatever they may be.”

How do we do that? By building the best CPaaS in the world, no less!

“Our technology touches every single mobile phone on the planet on average 17 times a year,” Oscar Werner explained.

Sinch was already #1 in mobile engagement but the acquisition of Inteliquent and Pathwire in 2021 turned us into the largest global CPaaS provider, with best-of-breed solutions for not only mobile messaging but also voice and email. Sinch can now support any communication needs, providing customers the widest choice of channels to engage with your brand. This puts us in a prime position to help businesses on their path to seamless omnichannel engagement.

We don’t only have all the communication channels on hand, we’re experts in them, and we own and have end-to-end control over the infrastructure.

As stated by President of Sinch Voice Ed O’Hara, “Sinch has the greatest, most secure owned voice network, covering 95% of the U.S. population and powering 300 billion high-quality voice calls a year, with 125 million owned numbers in service. That’s a scale no one else has out there.”

But it’s not only about our network. “The hardest thing to see, but perhaps the most important are the connections we have with carriers – the physical ones, and the personal ones,” O’Hara went on to say. “We’ve been building relationships with all major carriers for decades, which means we can reach out and respond to any issue quicker than anyone else.”

And, of course, no omnichannel strategy would be complete without a rock-solid email strategy!

As pointed out by President of Sinch Developer and Email Will Conway, “emails are the origins of the internet, and there are about 115 trillion emails sent a year, 125 billion a month, and 7.7 billion email accounts exist worldwide. And yet, 20% of all emails sent aren’t being delivered.”

“We found that being able to send billions of emails a month isn’t enough to support our customers. There are other parts that are just as important, and it starts before you even get to sending the email,” he explained.

From email verification to rendering, or InboxReady, we’ve got all the delivery tools needed to make sure emails actually reach customer inboxes.

“You want the best tool for the job, something that’s going to be scalable, something your developers enjoy using, and maybe even something that inspires you with your own product set. With these companies we’ve brought together, that’s exactly what you have. It creates differentiation and gives you operational uplift across all communications channels,” Conway concluded.

And just as importantly, at Sinch, we’re dedicated to client success. We support clients until their goals are met, whether they are based on conversion, churn reduction, operational efficiency, no-show reduction, or employee satisfaction. No matter how many discovery workshops it takes!

Find out more about how Sinch is transforming the way the world communicates, one conversation at a time.