With Communication Platform as a Service (CPaaS) solutions continuing to gain momentum in the landscape of business communications, businesses face an explosion of customer touchpoints, ranging from voice, email, and SMS to RCS, WhatsApp, and social media. Navigating this intricate web of options has become a challenge for many companies.
Amidst this complexity, BT and its Smart Messaging team stand out by offering a suite of CPaaS solutions that address common pain points faced by businesses. With more than a million business and public sector customers in the UK and serving organisations in around 180 countries worldwide, BT has been solidifying its presence in the cloud communications market, with a unique approach incorporating cutting-edge Rich Messaging and Conversational AI technologies.
In a recent conversation with Matt Allister, Smart Messaging Product Manager at BT, he described current business communication challenges and walked me through the communications giant’s way of tackling them.
Navigating CPaaS: Challenges and Pain Points
CPaaS, with its diverse communication channels, presents challenges that businesses must navigate to meet evolving customer expectations. Allister pointed out several key areas where customer interaction has become extra challenging:
Changing Customer Expectations: “In an era where immediacy is paramount, customers expect swift problem resolution,” Allister notes. “They want to communicate with the business over their preferred channels, demanding businesses to offer a diverse suite of capabilities to manage individual expectations effectively.”
Customer Experience and Personalization: “Customers increasingly seek personalised communications, as a more relevant experience compared to traditional bulk messaging,” he clarifies. Meeting this demand requires businesses to leverage data points to tailor their communications to individual needs, creating a more engaging and meaningful customer experience.
Customer Support: Modern call centers require powerful CPaaS and Conversational AI solutions to deal with call deflection efficiently. Allister explains: “They need to smoothly and appropriately move calls that are not picked up by an agent to a messaging chatbot, keeping a positive caller experience and maintaining or even improving resolution times.”
Knowledge and Automation: CPaaS and Conversational AI can also extend to Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and wider automation, which might sound threatening to certain businesses. “Features like intelligent document processing, for example, can empower customers to quickly and succinctly obtain a single source of truth from a variety of documentations,” Allister says. While these types of advanced capabilities might seem overwhelming to manage for many businesses, with the proper solutions, they can be a huge help to organisations and customers alike.
Recognizing these challenges and aiming to empower businesses not only to meet but exceed customer expectations, BT offers a range of comprehensive, easy-to-use CPaaS and Conversational AI solutions.
Solving Customers’ Problems, Today and Tomorrow
BT’s broad CPaaS portfolio, leveraging the company’s profound industry expertise, already caters to diverse industry verticals including banks, logistics, healthcare, and government, but the benefits can resonate much wider.
Allister shares: “BT stands out with a flexible range of CPaaS solutions, APIs, and AI capabilities. This allows us to tailor solutions to the specific needs of each enterprise customer and adjust to dynamic market needs.”
Catering to the constantly evolving business communications needs, the company has a special focus on Rich Messaging and Conversational AI technologies.
“BT’s emphasis on Rich Communication Services (RCS) in particular champions the elevation of the traditional SMS experience with cutting-edge Rich Messaging features,” Allister explains.
“Organisations can send images, media, etc. from a more secure, branded, and verified sender. Enabling these features through the default inbox on the user’s phone, which traditionally supports better message read rates, increases engagement.”
The integration of Conversational AI enables the utilization of intelligent chatbots, capable of understanding conversational nuances and semantics while providing personalized and contextually relevant responses.
“Our efforts in the Conversational AI space aim to use AI-driven solutions to create intelligent chatbots that can be utilized over multiple channels and across multiple languages, effectively further enhancing Rich Messaging,” Allister says.
Equipped with cutting-edge technology, experienced support, and an uncompromising commitment to messaging security, BT has positioned itself as a strategic partner for businesses seeking to enhance customer engagement and communication strategies.
For more information about BT’s CPaaS solutions, visit their website here.
