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99% of people say it is essential that a business communicates effectively with its customers. As far as internal communication goes, 72% of business leaders believe effective communication has increased their team’s productivity.
Effective communication not only fosters cooperation and teamwork but also boosts employee productivity. It ensures clarity and streamlines informational flow within the team across departments.
Then, there is the global communication platform as service (CPaaS) market forecast to hit $21.7 billion by 2025, a testament to the rapidly increasing significance of communication in business.
Evaluating communication platforms to find the right one for your business is an overwhelming decision. Too many moving parts!
In this blog, we help businesses choose the best cloud communication platform or CPaaS by examining the key factors you should consider while making an informed decision.
Key Factors For Selecting The Best Communication Platform
Evaluating The Integration Capabilities
The best communication platform will easily and seamlessly integrate with most existing tools and systems. So, check the integration capabilities of the CPaaS platform or service provider on:
- With which ones and how easily can APIs integrate with third-party tools and systems?
- Does the platform allow it, and if so, how easy is it to add more communication channels to the platform later on?
- Can you integrate the platform into third-party systems like CRM, eCommerce, cloud marketing, etc?
Ability To Scale As Your Business Grows
Scalability is what allows a communication platform to scale or have the ability to handle or facilitate more.
The platform or the service provider must be able to maintain performance, efficiency, reliability, and cost-effectiveness as your business grows.
Here’s what you need to ensure they offer:
- Scaling capabilities of resources and communication infrastructure
- Must have a global network and reach
- Ability to process a large volume of inquiries
- Ability to handle sudden spikes in traffic and accommodate growing communication needs
- Understand the API rate limits and throttling policies
Route Mobile’s CPaaS possesses infrastructure, bandwidth, and resources enough to address the consistently growing requirements of a medium to large enterprise.
Use-Friendly Interface For Easy Navigation
The communication platform you choose must be user-friendly, intuitive, and easy to navigate.
Ensure it is simple enough for your team to efficiently utilise the features of the CPaaS platform, even without any technical know-how.
An easy-to-use platform without a complex learning curve improves adoption rate, productivity, and internal communication.
Cost-Effective CPaaS Platform
Cost is an essential factor to examine while opting for communication platforms. Depending upon your budget, requirements, and scope of usage, you choose a cost-effective CPaaS solution.
Most CPaaS or communication platforms offer usage-based pricing. However, check for hidden charges or unexpected costs down the line. Make sure you choose a service provider with transparent pricing and flexibility.
Also Read: Understanding CPaaS: Benefits, Use Cases, and Tips for Selecting the Right Provider
Must Adhere To Compliance & Security Regulations
94% of companies agree that customers won’t buy from them if they don’t believe personal data is properly secured.
So, make sure to analyse where the communication platform or CPaaS provider stands in terms of security and compliance.
Even if you’re successful in building effective communication but fail to comply with the industry regulations and security protocols, there is no point in all this.
Here are some top security capabilities of CPaaS providers you must check:
- End-to-end Encryption
- Compliance Standards and Regulations like GDPR and HIPPA
- Verified Messages
- Sender Verification
- IP Whitelisting
- Two-factor Authentication (2FA)
- Enterprise-level security connections like SSL
- Downtime Management
- Disaster Recovery
Transparency Signals Towards High Trust And Loyalty Factor
Prefer to select service providers who are transparent as they are the most reliable and trustworthy.
You can find out simply by noticing how open they are about their software or platform compliance with data privacy and safety regulations worldwide.
Also looking for:
- Clear pricing model to avoid unexpected costs
- Multi-channel experience to reduce integration complexities, overhead costs, and inefficiency in dealing with all the communication channels separately.
- Opt-channel system is the ability to pick the most cost-effective channel for a message.
Also Read: Conversational AI in CPaaS- Revolutionizing Customer Interaction
Provide Omnichannel Communication Through A Comprehensive Suite Of Features & Tools
Here are some features that a communication platform must offer:
- Messaging: Different types of messaging services, including RCS, A2P voice, and two-way messaging, along with features like automation, must be part of the communication platform.
- Email: Ability to create campaigns, integrate and manage email automation, and utilise centralised data for segmentation and personalisation.
- APIs: Offering APIs for multiple communication channels to strengthen the omnichannel marketing approach
- Voice: Must provide VoIP and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) support for enhanced customer service.
- Chatbot: Ability to integrate AI-powered chatbots for automation, high customer engagement, and customer satisfaction.
- Analytics: Must offer detailed analytics and reporting to make data-backed decisions like personalisation and segmentation for campaigns.
- Omnichannel: Provide advanced platforms like CPaaS with next-gen tools and features to simplify managing multiple communication channels simultaneously.
Apart from all this, also look for the features addressing the emerging CPaaS future trends such as:
- Low-code and no-code tools
- AI-powered chatbots
- Real-time tracking of customer interactions
- Real-time analytics & reports
Reputed cloud communication providers like Route Mobile offer CPaaS solutions with all these top advanced features and tools for crafting a powerful omnichannel strategy.
Check The API Availability For Multiple Communication Channels
Businesses need to leverage communication tools of all varieties serving their unique purposes. To explore this, the platform must offer a varied range of communication APIs, such as:
- SMS API
- WhatsApp Business API
- Facebook Messenger API
- Messenger API for Instagram
Then, there are more APIs that top communication platforms like Route Mobile offer, such as voice API, email API, RCS API, Video API, and more.
It helps businesses to create a powerful omnichannel communication strategy covering all the communication channels.
Must Read: The Power of APIs in CPaaS: Easy Communication Integration
Ease Of Implementation & Ongoing Support
Choosing a communication platform for your business that lacks ease in implementation will be challenging, especially if your team is not tech-savvy. So, you better opt for the one that offers ongoing support during implementation.
Prefer to choose a communication platform provider that can provide seamless API integration.
Must Be Reliable In Performance, Services & Tech Support
Start with shortlisting for business communication platforms catering to the top-tier network carriers. Such clientele clearly demonstrate their reliability and credibility quotient as it ensures:
- High-quality calls
- Uptime guarantees like 99.999%
- Fast API calls
- Minimal downtime
With such consistency in uptime, minimum downtime, and availability, you will always pick a reliable communication platform.
Also, ensure the business service provider you choose offers the CPaaS platform with robust, multi-support, and 24/7 technical support. They must provide multiple support channels like email, live chat, and phone.
Offering Onboarding Services & Initial Support
Look for effective onboarding services and ongoing support that further help businesses implement easily.
Choose a CPaaS provider that offers help to businesses to get started with their comprehensive support and onboarding services, including:
- Developer community
- Online resources
- Step-by-step onboarding procedures and documentation
- Dedicated success manager to guide you through and maximise the platform’s potential.
Conclusion
Communication platforms, or CPaaS, are integral to internal communication and business operations. It improves teamwork and establishes a sense of clear direction for the collective towards a single objective.
Choosing an ideal communication platform involves examining your options with shared parameters like integration, ease of use, scalability, support, reliability, and more.
Route Mobile is a reputable brand offering cloud communication services, including CPaaS solutions, for businesses. To get started, contact our experts today!
FAQs
What Are The Key Factors To Consider While Choosing A Communication Platform?
Key factors to consider are integration capabilities, API availability, scalability, security & compliance, ease of implementation, reliability, support, ease of use, cost, and multichannel support.
How Does Scalability Influence Your Choice Of Communication Platform?
Evaluate the communication platform based on its scalability. It is the ability of the platform to grow and scale with your business, accommodating the new users and need for increased features without compromising performance or hindering day-to-day operations.
What Additional Features You Should Look For In A CPaaS Platform?
While choosing an ideal CPaaS platform, be sure to look for additional features like rich messaging services, 2-way messaging, AI-chatbot integration, API, contact centre automation, and other communication channels support like voice, chat, email, and video.
