Business communications are changing – what should you do?

Communication is critical to business success, whether internally with your team or externally with your customers and partners.

The COVID-19 pandemic made organisations realise how important it is to stay connected. This resulted in a surge in demand for communications platform-as-a-service (CPaaS),¹ as businesses sought solutions to stay connected with employees and customers despite the distance.

Given this upswing, the CPaaS market’s global value exceeded USD10 billion for the first time in 2022, a 17% growth from USD8.6 billion in 2021.² By 2026, the CPaaS industry will grow to USD34.1 billion, a 293% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2021 to 2026.³

As CPaaS is a cloud-based service, providers fully manage CPaaS solutions. Application programming interfaces (APIs) built into CPaaS allow companies to add voice, messaging, and video features to enhance internal communications and customer experience.

Gartner predicts that, by 2025, 95% of global enterprises will utilise API-enabled CPaaS solutions to level up their digital competitiveness.⁴ The best CPaaS solutions are integrated platforms that offer a wide selection of APIs that span fast-growing programmable communications services.¹

As the business landscape evolves, enterprise communication also changes. CPaaS solutions enable companies and empower teams through flexible communications. Here’s how CPaaS solutions are evolving alongside changes in enterprise communication. 

Companies of all sizes still prefer calling: more than 90% of employees say phone calls or voice calls are still their primary or one of their main communications tools, according to a survey by Ring Central. In particular, business leaders prefer phone conversations, whether with individuals or groups of team members and customers in meetings.⁵

Today’s workers are more mobile than ever and take calls from their homes, offices, or on the go. They want access to advanced calling features on any device—whether mobile phones, PCs, or desk phones.

While more than half of companies (53.2%) still use legacy on-premise phones for business communications, this norm is starting to change. To date, 30.7% of companies use cloud-based phone systems, which will increase over time due to hybrid and remote work.

CPaaS solutions such as Voice API, Singtel MultiLine, Mobile Unified Communications (UC), and Teams UC Connector enable your employees to make, receive, and monitor voice calls from any device. Call your employees or customers on their preferred devices or channels to increase their satisfaction and engagement.

CPaaS makes it possible to reach employees through their communication medium of choice, whether it’s an internet-based instant messaging service like WhatsApp or Facebook, or even SMS.

Soon, CPaaS will integrate more messaging apps and dive into deeper conversational capabilities than SMS.⁴ For example, team messaging APIs build conversation-rich chatbots into your business applications, with real-time notifications.⁵

However, over 95% of businesses surveyed still use SMS in some capacity.⁵ SMS APIs add support for individual or group SMS, with delivery or read status notifications.

Singtel, for one, has an SMS API whose direct connections and redundancy offer reliable SMS delivery. Integrating SMS API into existing software allows you to configure and automate messaging features that grow with your business. Direct access to the SMS gateway ensures a secure connection between company devices and network providers.

There is a growing demand for vertical video, even in CPaaS solutions, according to International Data Corporation (IDC) research.⁶ While vertical videos have become all the rage in social media marketing, the trend has also found its way to CPaaS integrations.⁷

Research shows that people hold their smartphones vertically 91.7% of the time.⁸ And since most employees now use smartphones for communication, their video-calling preference has gone vertical, too.

As businesses continue to use cloud-based video conferencing, there are opportunities to improve and innovate video APIs for CPaaS solutions. According to Gartner, CPaaS video will grow by 80% in 2022. Programmable video capabilities allow CPaaS to humanise digital interactions, while building in-app video through APIs enables integrated workflows for your teams.⁴     

CPaaS solutions such as Singtel Video Conferencing deliver high-definition video, crisp audio, and powerful content-sharing capabilities on any device—from smartphones and tablets to desktops and video room systems—even with low bandwidth.

APIs are fast becoming business enablers, the keys to vital CPaaS integrations. However, as with any emerging technology, APIs still have gaps and vulnerabilities. Since businesses use APIs to integrate services and transfer data, a compromised API can lead to a data breach.

In response to these security risks, there is a growing demand for purpose-built API security, including those for CPaaS integrations.⁹ To further enhance security and data privacy, CPaaS solutions can employ end-to-end encryption and prevent access to message content.

Singtel’s CPaaS solutions seamlessly integrate secure communication layers across critical business tools, with built-in voice and text capture to keep official records of conversations. Banking and investments, trading, insurance, and education companies need this feature for compliance recording and security standards. 

The most significant benefit of CPaaS solutions is how easy it is to integrate with existing apps.¹⁰ And since it primarily uses APIs, the addition of CPaaS solutions does not compromise the integrity of your existing apps, allowing for improved unified communications.

In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, unified communications supported hybrid and remote workers, allowing easy collaboration from one platform and personalised customisation of API integrations. Hybrid and remote work arrangements accelerated demand for cloud-based unified communications. By 2024, Gartner projects that 74% of new licenses for unified communications will be cloud-based instead of on-premises, an increase from 48% in 2019.¹¹   

Singtel provides pre-integrated end-to-end unified communications (UC) solutions that businesses can mix and match for interoperability. Teams UC Connector enables employees to make and receive voice calls via the Microsoft Teams app without needing additional hardware.

It unifies your workplace by integrating voice and collaboration tools with your Microsoft Office suite, all in one place. Connect with your employees anytime, anywhere, across multiple devices, using a single business number. Seamless access to voice calls and collaboration tools in one platform helps increase employee engagement and productivity.  

Ready to adopt CPaaS for your enterprise? Singtel’s suite of CPaaS solutions can help you leverage cost-effective, flexible, and agile cloud-based communications to empower your teams and customers. Get in touch with us today to get started.

References

1. SAP News Center, COVID-19 Driving Rapid Growth in CPaaS Market, 2020.
2. Juniper Research, CPaaS Revenue to Exceed $10 Billion Globally in 2022, as Vendors Seek Further Platform Differentiation, 2021.
3. Juniper Research, CPaaS: Market Outlook, Emerging Opportunities & Forecasts 2021-2026, 2021.
4. Forbes, The CPaaS Industry Is In Hyper Growth: A Blueprint Of CPaaS And Its Future, 2022.
5. RingCentral Blog, [New Report] 7 business communication trends for 2023, 2022.
6. IDC, Top 5 Trends to Watch in CPaaS in 2022, 2022.
7. Forbes, The Rise Of Vertical Video: How Top Brands Are Adopting A New Content Format, 2018.
8. ScientiaMobile, How Do Mobile Video Viewers Hold Their Phone?, 2019.
9. IDC, Growing Interest in Purpose-Built API Security: Key Considerations for IT Buyers, 2022.
10. Forbes, What Is CPaaS? Communications Platform As A Service Explained, 2022.
11. UCToday, Gartner Magic Quadrant for UCaaS 2020 Revealed, 2020.