In his bestseller Tipping Point, author Malcolm Gladwell defined a tipping point as a moment of critical mass, when the status quo changes. Companies operating today have reached this point when it comes to the importance of customer experience.
Great acceleration
To Avaya Director and innovator Davide Petramala, the primacy of the experience is expected in an evolving digital economy. “Even before COVID, customer engagement gave you your positioning and your way forward. It’s a digital world, and people want better ways to engage and be engaged.”
Petramala is not surprised that Communications-Platform-as-a-Service (CPaaS) is coming into its own. “Companies want massive innovation at a low entry cost. Pre-pandemic, innovations like CPaaS were on people’s roadmap. But since the pandemic first hit, there’s been a great acceleration or advancement of this roadmap.”
If things were competitive before, they’re really competitive now, he said. In a world where you now have to compete daily with the Amazons of the world, you must possess the ability to pivot quickly without it costing you the moon and the stars.
A solution and service for the times
CPaaS is a cloud-based platform that offers the simplified delivery of multiple communication services, from SMS and email to voice, RCS, and social. CPaaS allows companies to more richly connect with customers who expect a singular experience.
It’s an approach to change that has come into its own in the COVID era.
“The pandemic shone a light on organizational shortcomings,” said Petramala. “Call centers at the front line in the fight against COVID have been inundated. Very early on it was clear many of them just weren’t equipped to handle what was coming at them.”
“Avaya has helped businesses adjust quickly to pandemic restrictions by providing automation services for critical issues they were facing, such as Curbside pickup for retailers, COVID test results for health agencies and call deflection services for inundated Call centers globally. And our healthcare clients seeking COVID-19 contact tracing the ability to establish better communications, precisely at the points in the chain where they’re needed.”
As CPaaS is provider-held and cloud-based, there’s no need for decision-makers to blow their budgets on infrastructure that supports a single feature or to have to future-proof against an unscalable solution.
“We deliver engagement as a service, based on developers having open access to our network to build cloud solutions,” said Petramala. “Apps can be prototyped, built, and pushed far quicker than any homebrew app. It enables organizations to easily compose the experiences they want to provide to customers. We provide the infrastructure; you provide the imagination and the use cases.”
Avaya CPaaS offers businesses:
- AI-based workflow – Native integration with Avaya and Google AI for intelligent inbound and outbound workflows
- Messaging – the ability to build intelligent, reliable messaging apps
- Voice – a single API to add voice and calling features to your web or mobile apps
- Phone numbers – the means to buy local and toll-free numbers and short codes, fully online and with no setup required
- Carrier services – access to caller insights to help nurture sales leads, analyze the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, and prevent fraud and spam
- Composable pre-built services to accelerate GTM for over the top automation and innovation
- Dedicated innovation specialist and partners that can assist in building and launching consumable services for your business
Moving forward
There are a number of key questions you can begin asking right now as you prepare for a move toward CPaaS, including:
- What features will you and your customers need now and in the future?
- What apps do you currently have and maintain?
- Do you have plans to launch any new services in the future?
- Will you require support or can you manage that piece independently?
Call 1 866 GO-AVAYA today to find out more about Avaya CPaaS.