Seamless communication is a key part of operational efficiency and customer satisfaction. Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) lets you achieve that without completely overhauling your infrastructure.

CPaaS works by adding communication features, like voice, text, and video conferencing, into your existing tools. Your employees won’t have the frustration and time loss from switching tabs or moving data from one tool to another—and your customers will appreciate the efficiency.

What is CPaaS?

Platform as a Service (PaaS), is a cloud-hosted environment where developers can build, run, and manage apps or services. The key takeaway is that it’s meant only for developers.

In contrast, Software as a Service (SaaS) delivers cloud-hosted applications for end-users.

This leads us to CPaaS. It’s a subset of PaaS that focuses on communication, and it allows developers to embed communication tools into your existing applications.

They won’t have to worry about maintaining the infrastructure (the CPaaS provider takes care of this), giving them more time to focus on customizing your apps.

Here are some of the capabilities typical CPaaS providers include:

• VoIP phone service.
• SMS and MMS texts.
• Audio calls.
• Video calls.
• Two-factor authentication.
• Customer messaging.
• Number masking.
• Interactive Voice Response (IVR).
• Call recording.
• Chatbots for customer service.
• Push notifications.
• Real-time analytics.
• Call routing and forwarding.
• File sharing.
• Screen sharing during video calls.
• Geolocation services.
• Speech recognition.
• Virtual phone numbers.
• Language translation services.
• Sentiment analysis.
• Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC) support.
• Email services.
• Payment processing.
• Scheduling and appointments.
• Automated surveys.
• Text-to-speech and speech-to-text conversion.
• Fax services.

Combining many of these together gives you the same functionality as a VoIP service, without having to pay a monthly subscription or fit your workflows around their rigid interfaces.

CPaaS use cases

These are my favorite examples of successful CPaaS implementations. Not only did these companies implement it well, they also saw incredible results.

MercadoLibre used Twilio to improve customer loyalty

MercadoLibre, an online marketplace that operates in 19 countries, needed to scale its communications from email-only to multi-channel.

Initially, the team planned to hire a telephone provider in each country it serves, but this turned out to be more complicated than they anticipated. They then turned their focus on a custom build. Their goal? A single solution that integrated with its existing CRM platform and provided telephony support around the world.

MercadoLibre landed on Twilio, which allowed them to add a click-to-call system in their help portal—simple, but incredibly effective.

By opting for CPaaS and providing a support solution customers were asking for, the company was able to achieve a phenomenal 65% Net Promoter Score (NPS).

WhatConverts reduced call tracking costs with Avaya

WhatConverts, a lead tracking agency, needed a single platform to bridge the gap between their business applications so they could spot communication trends. Doing this in-house was too costly in terms of the human resources required.

By leveraging Avaya’s CPaaS, they reduced call tracking costs by 94%. This enabled WhatConverts to reduce costs for end customers while providing a superior service.

Conair achieved 90% employee satisfaction using RingCentral

Conair is a global company that sells personal care products. Its team experienced a myriad of issues with the legacy phone system they had. It only allowed a limited number of employees to access voicemail at the same time and offered no functionality beyond dialing out.

The system was also time-intensive, accounting for 20% of IT’s time each week to deal with small requests, such as changing users in the phone system.

Conair needed a robust CPaaS solution to unify communications and provide modern telephony capabilities, such as integrating with Salesforce and providing call-volume trends.

RingCentral provided these features through its platform, saving Conair four days per month managing phone system changes and improving employee satisfaction from 40% to 90%.

SEE: Learn more about how conversational IVR can benefit a customer support team.

Advantages of CPaaS

CPaaS can lead to significant cost, time, and effort savings, especially when compounded across a large number of users who regularly use workarounds to get their job done.

It can also lead to increased customer satisfaction, better decision making, and improved analytics. Because CPaaS leverages APIs and a pay-as-you-consume model, you can easily adapt to market or seasonal changes while streamlining workflows for your team.

Plus, it’s infinitely scalable and customizable. There’s a lot to appreciate.

Disadvantages of CPaaS

The main disadvantage is that it requires a developer to implement. Even with a developer, building custom systems is challenging and can be incredibly time consuming. On top of that, you’ll likely have to go through numerous rounds of adjustments before you get it right.

While that’s the most significant hurdle, there are a few others, too:

• Security concerns: The open nature of CPaaS platforms can leave you open to vulnerabilities, which is a major concern if you’re transmitting sensitive information.
• Hidden costs: CPaaS can include unexpected overage fees, additional charges for extra features, and potential expenses for fraud prevention.
• Multi-vendor inefficiencies: Despite offering a lot of streamlining opportunities, you could experience connectivity or compatibility issues in a multi-vendor environment.

CPaaS alternatives

CPaaS is one way to consolidate business communications, but its long runway and upfront investment isn’t for everyone.

Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS)

UCaaS is a viable option if you want a communications suite that’s ready to go out of the box. It includes just about every feature you could ever need for internal and external communication.

Unlike CPaaS, it’s a complete solution that’s ready to use on day one. Most UCaaS solutions combine text, video, voice, chat, email, and faxing into a centralized interface, complete with a full list of one-click integrations to connect to other tools.

While its plug-and-play nature is appealing, you’ll have fewer customization options. You’ll also most likely pay a flat fee per user per month, which can be significantly more expensive, especially if you have users who rarely use the features included.

UCaaS is often used interchangeably with VoIP software–in practice they’re virtually the same thing, although technically they do have their differences.

Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS)

Similar to UCaaS, CCaaS is a full contact center solution that’s pretty much ready to go for enhancing the customer experience across multiple channels.

It works by centralizing social media, video, text, voice, messaging apps, and email correspondence into a centralized interface. Unlike UCaaS, however, this type of solution includes a wide range of advanced features, like IVR, workforce optimization, and automatic call distribution to help call centers manage high volumes.

CCaaS offers a cloud-based contact center solution that facilitates customer service operations. This service provides a platform for managing customer interactions across various channels, such as voice, chat, email, and social media.

Initial implementation complexity lies somewhere between UCaaS and CPaaS.

Traditional telephony and on-premise solutions

All of the solutions I’ve covered so far are cloud-based, meaning the infrastructure and servers the software is hosted on are maintained by the provider.

Some businesses prefer complete control and opt for an on-premise deployment. This means you’ll install the software on your own servers and be responsible for updates, patches, security, and maintenance.

Many companies are even still using traditional PBX systems from last century because it’s too much of a pain to upgrade.

In most cases, I recommend avoiding this route. Unless you have the need and resources to handle all of this yourself, cloud-based is far easier to manage.

Mixed-vendor environment

Instead of knocking out every communication channel with one provider, you can get each piece from different vendors. You could use Zoom for video conferencing and OpenPhone or Nextiva for your phone system, for example. You could also continue using your legacy phone system and add Google Meet for team chat and video conferencing.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with doing this–it does give you the ability to choose the absolute best platform for each communication channel. But it may start to get unwieldy as you grow.

Custom-built solutions

CPaaS makes it possible to embed communication capabilities inside of existing apps. A custom-built solution means embedding communications capabilities inside of an app you built.

It’s a great option if you have very specific needs, but it requires a substantial upfront investment—even more so than using CPaaS inside of other software.