Businessess are looking to capture the attention and imagination of their demanding customers with unified, connected engagement. This becomes vital in an era where customers are well-versed in the customer-centric technologies employed by the popular services they use, which deliver a seamless, context-aware experience and set the benchmark for other businesses to match or exceed.
Introducing CPaaS Solutions for Business by Airtel IQ
Airtel IQ is a cloud-based omni-channel communication platform enabling businesses to deepen engagement with customers through timely and secure communication. CPaaS, also called Communications Platform as a Service includes a group of technologies that allow businesses to engage any customer on any channel of the customer's choice from the exact stage of their journey with the brand to the next stage. Given the basic tenets of cloud technology offering context anytime and anywhere, context is carried to the next channel being used by the customer who is trying to resolve the business query he or she has.
How Airtel's CPaaS Platform improves business communication
The cloud promise cannot be ignored, with immense business value offered. For instance, it helps businesses deliver nuanced communication for specific business or customer needs with custom enterprise applications or web pages. And with Airtel's flexible and simple APIs, organizations can get started in no time.
Airtel is renowned for its telecom-grade infrastructure, which seamlessly integrates various customer communication channels such as SMS, voice, and IVR. Regardless of the communication method customers are accustomed to, this unified architecture ensures businesses receive a comprehensive communication solution with reliability, making Airtel a one-stop CPaaS provider.
In addition, business communication becomes even more streamlined with:
- Configurable APIs: Enterprises can define the participants they want to add to the solution, the kind of announcements they want to play, and other runtime configuration aspects.
- Smart call routing: This route calls to teams qualified to respond to specific queries, or to specific call queues where automated resolutions or tickets can be auto-configured.
- Smart IVR: Organizations can set up multi-level Interactive Voice Response flows to route calls to the precise call queue, and offer features like hold, mute, and transfer.
Benefits of CPaaS Services by Airtel IQ
With an on-premise or in-house solution, not only do you have to have adequate resources to keep it running, but it would be really hard to maintain customer context with evolving protocols across a suite of channels frequented by your customers. That should be enough fuel to nudge you to consider what a cloud customer engagement platform (CPaaS) like Airtel IQ's CPaaS services could unlock for your business:
Smarter Marketing:
- Integrated marketing campaigns: Target the right audience from Day 1 with tailored communication via any channel (omnichannel) to deliver superior ROI
- Easy Click-to-Call: Help your sales teams make easy calls to prospects who have shared their contact details with a simple click, versus dialing numbers manually
- Actionable insights: Gauge possibilities for conversion and up-sell by analyzing patterns from a wide scope of analytics available, to make informed decisions
Personalized Customer Experience:
- Customized IVR: Route calls to the right agents or queues, raise a ticket for the right category, or send relevant voice responses to resolve callers' queries
- Automated calls: Generate automated outbound calls and SMS as part of any campaign or awareness drive using an outbound dialer (OBD)
- Virtual Relationship Manager solution for efficient communication: Assign relationship managers for specific customer cohorts to connect with customers across channels
Intelligent Operations:
- Secure communication: Use virtual numbers to mask both employee and customer numbers from being displayed to the other. This feature immensely helps protect personal information when you work with third-party outbound calling agencies.
- Customer notifications: Share key information with customers and employees across any app that can offer this feature
- Commerce and collection solutions: Collect payments faster with transaction reminder SMS or WhatsApp messages, including custom payment links and acknowledging payments made
- Appointment reminders: Help customers recall important appointments and help employees remember important customer engagement events too.
Key Products Offering by Airtel CPaaS Solution
Get powerful cloud communication capabilities that can be plugged in and played at enterprises of any size, without significant setup time:
Voice API:
Deliver human-to-human experiences via voice solutions
- Mobile number CLI: A 10 digital virtual mobile number (caller line identity) to increase the likelihood of call pick-ups
- Landline CLI: A 10-digit virtual number (caller line identity) to help customers gauge the local identity of the incoming caller and increase chances of pick-up
- Toll-free CLI: A non-chargeable number for customers to connect with businesses
- Number masking: Replace real phone numbers with namesake numbers
- IVR: Automate call responses with pre-recorded messages
- Outbound dialer: Bulk call customers with marketing campaigns
SMS API:
- Multiple SMS formats: Service Implicit/Explicit, promotional and transactional formats are supported
- URL shortening: Auto-shorten weblinks to fit the crisp nature of SMS or WhatsApp messages
- Campaign manager: With a single click, schedule SMS campaigns
- Blacklisting & Duplicate number removal: Remove problematic recipients or those wanting to opt out. Eliminate duplicate numbers.
- Personalized SMS: Add custom fields to suit your communication styles
- Vernacular support: Deliver communication in the language of your choice
- DLT Scrubbing: Use telco-grade privacy assurance for zero spam and fraud
- Analytics & Reporting: Generate reports with 'sent (to network or failed attempts), 'in-progress', or 'failed'.
Whatsapp API:
- Verified Business Profiles: Build trust and communicate effectively
- Rich media messages: Engage customers with images, videos, and more
- End-to-end encryption: Reduce security risks
- Delivery & read receipts: Track engagement and remind customers who missed engaging with your communication
- Conversational analytics: Gauge patterns and optimize communication efforts
- Conversational Bots: Create automated conversations for specific customer questions or business topics
How CPaaS Service Providers Empower Customer Communication
CPaaS partners become a distinguished part of Airtel's global partner network, vastly expanding the partner's reach and business potential. As a service partner of Airtel's CPaaS solution, you can offer custom solutions to cater to all industry needs and build unique features and capabilities, such as the WhatsApp Business Platform to build communication flows with customers to fulfil specific business scenarios automatically or with minimal agent intervention. Service providers can build their own customer engagement and communication layers on top of the base solution, and introduce tracking mechanisms to audit the success of automated engagement sequences and campaigns across applications.
Industries leveraging CPaaS Solutions by Airtel IQ
Currently, a spectrum of industries including tech-based services, healthcare, government services, food delivery and manufacturing use Airtel IQ's CPaaS solutions. In fact, this is an industry-agnostic solution that any business of any size or scope of operations can deploy, without worrying about factoring in any kind of criteria.
Uses of Communications Platform as a Service in Enterprise
A communication platform from a CPaaS provider can be used in the following ways:
- Customer service: Stand up a contact centre in hours, not days and engage customers with an enterprise-ready solution to efficiently and capably handle customer queries, resolution mechanisms, and more
- Sales engagement: Let sales pitch the businesses' solutions, manage prospects' queries, and embed CRM data with the solution
- Finance and collections: Configure relevant communication to receive timely payments, configure periodic reminders for defaulters, and schedule collection engagement
Important Functionalities of CPaaS Services
Omni-channel, always-on communication based on a cloud platform service like CPaaS offers:
- Outbound call software: Get new phone numbers instantly & trigger outbound campaigns with ease. This is usually used in sales and business services
- Inbound call management: Manage inbound calls by triggering webhooks to route calls to certain cohorts or specific agents.
- Multimedia & video messaging: Layer text messaging with rich media to boost attention and engagement rates
- Text messaging: Set up SMS communication for the businesses’ customers and build two-way messaging for customers to contact the business.
- Private messaging: WhatsApp delivers encrypted communication with strong capabilities like group-based digital bots, rich media interaction, and more
How to choose a CPaaS solution
Find a solution that helps the business get started easily with the nominal effort needed to restructure the existing communication tool stack into the CPaaS architecture. Here is what must be considered:
- Hassle-free implementation: Getting started must be quick and not require reinventing the existing architecture.
- Easy integrations: The nature of the CPaaS platform must allow new or non-integrated capabilities to be absorbed well into the platform with minimal coding and restructuring.
- Availability of integrations: The CPaaS provider must offer a gamut of communication APIs that can be readily deployed
- Reliability and security: It is vital that communication is secure and reliable, ensuring maximum uptime
- 24x7 support: Having consistent support is reassuring, and helps the business deliver service levels
Why Airtel IQ CPaaS Platform is an Ideal Partner for Your Business
Airtel’s offers an unmatched 4-pronged proposition to transform a business’ communication efforts:
- Integrations: Easily and intuitively integrate the platform with the business using flexible, low-cost, easy-to-use API development tools
- Unified SLAs - Bring about efficiency using a single pane of glass with a unified SLA, from network to applications
- Built for speed - Leverage telco-grade reliability, security and robustness with a pan-India network
- Full stack access - Use an API, through Single Sign-on access (SSO) from a common User interface