Telco Service Providers: Webex Connect powers the path to CPaaS leadership

Communications platform as a service (CPaaS) is one of the most exciting technologies in the SaaS space. Enterprises across all industries are leveraging the APIs and real-time communication capabilities offered by providers to transform how they interact and deliver services to their customers. Demand is so high that IDC forecasts that the market will grow to $17.7 billion by 2024.

Telecommunication Service Providers are in a unique position to capitalize on the CPaaS opportunity – but time is running out.

For the last 10 years, the winning strategy was for telcos to make it easy for CPaaS vendors to integrate into their network and be the ones that directly talk to and offer communication services to enterprises. But now, they need to change their strategy, becoming CPaaS providers themselves – otherwise they risk missing out on the opportunity that CPaaS represents to monetize their network assets and unlock new revenue streams.

Partnerships offer a path to CPaaS leadership

According to Gartner’s ‘4 Key Pillars to Telco Success in the CPaaS Market’, the CPaaS market is already too advanced for Service Providers to rely on building their offerings organically. Instead, they must look to form a platform partnership with existing CPaaS providers.

By taking the partnership route, Service Providers will accelerate their go-to-market, have access to a proven customer engagement platform, and be able to gain revenue from services they previously could not offer.

Through their chosen CPaaS platform, Service Providers can use APIs to expose services that are provisioned on their networks, such as SMS, voice, and geolocation. More importantly, the partnership approach will allow them to gain revenue from services and channels where they are not involved in the value chain. For example, digital channels like Apple Messages for Business and WhatsApp, which are increasingly being used to enable business to consumer interactions.

Webex Connect: an enterprise-grade CPaaS platform

Webex Connect is an enterprise-grade CPaaS solution – offering a single, centralized platform for building and managing customer engagement applications end-to-end. It’s designed to reduce the time, cost, and complexity of delivering outstanding customer and employee experiences at scale.

It provides an extended low-code tool set that enables developers, solution architects, product managers, and other business users across the enterprise to own their part of the customer experience, helping to accelerate the speed to market of new applications and journeys. The platform acts like the glue between back-end systems and customer communication channels, allowing for the delivery of end-to-end journeys that maintain context over time and channels.

What makes Webex Connect stand out from the rest is that it provides much more than just an API approach to CPaaS. The platform has a powerful engine to integrate business and partner systems, a drag-and-drop interface for building and maintaining customer journeys, extensive AI and NLP capabilities, and tools that allow for the deeper usage of channels. Not only can Service Providers use Webex Connect to power their own customer experience transformation initiatives, but also can provision the platform for their enterprise customers, acting as the foundation of their CPaaS offering.

Through Webex Connect, Service Providers will have a full customer engagement platform that surfaces, aggregates, and monetizes their own network assets and APIs while enabling them to earn revenue through software license fees.

The backing of an expert team

At Webex, we offer more than just the technology. We have a dedicated and expert team with years' worth of experience of navigating the communications landscape and working with enterprises to deploy CPaaS solutions.

This team works with Service Providers throughout the onboarding process, educating you on how to utilize the platform and adopt expand your CPaaS offering. They support business teams as they begin selling CPaaS solutions and services, helping to define first pitches to ensure Service Providers hit the ground running as a CPaaS provider.

Increasing your revenue streams today and tomorrow

By investing in a CPaaS offering now, Service Providers will be able to protect, and even increase, revenue streams into the future.

If you want to learn more about Webex Connect and how it can power your path to CPaaS leadership, please don’t hesitate to get in touch via our contact us page.