Make Partnerships The Heart Of Communication

Businesses across the world are adopting cloud-based enterprise communication solutions to reduce operating expenses, increase revenues and strengthen customer relationships.

According to Gartner, enterprise IT spending on public cloud computing will overtake spending on traditional IT in 2025,  with 51 per cent of IT spending shifting from traditional solutions, compared to 41 per cent in 2022. What’s more, global IT spending is expected to reach a total of $4.4 trillion in 2022, an increase of 4 per cent from 2021. It is also estimated that digital business initiatives, such as experiential end-consumer experience, a marketing approach that immerses customers within a service, as well as optimisation of the supply chain, will push spending on enterprise applications and infrastructure software into double-digit growth next year.

Interestingly, Gartner’s research shows that a significant proportion of the annual global IT spend is dedicated to enterprise communication solutions. This is largely due to new technologies, such as Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS), Contact Centre as a Service (CCaas), Mobile Identity, Internet of Things, cybersecurity, and software-defined networking (SDN) driving changes in the underlying hardware, software, and services. In fact, meeting this fast-growing demand to embed communication into enterprise applications has evolved into a basic requirement over recent years.

Growing addressable market

In tandem, the worldwide enterprise software revenue market is predicted to grow by 13 per cent between 2018 and 2022, with the Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) segment set to achieve the highest rate of growth at 30 per cent. This is more than double the rate of the total enterprise software growth for this five-year period.

In a recent survey by IDC, 93 per cent of enterprises said they engage directly with cloud communications platform vendors or third-party developers to enable real-time communication applications and collaboration tools. These trends show first-hand the benefits that players in the enterprise communication space and their partners can reap. Massive opportunities exist, especially for local companies that want to partner with global solution providers, embrace new channels, build stronger customer relationships, expand product portfolios and attract new business.

The uptake of cloud-based solutions for fast and seamless communication will continue this growth trajectory. Especially when we consider the fact that businesses are deploying cloud-based collaboration solutions across various time zones so that they can improve the productivity of their mobile team members.

Creating additional value

By partnering with a provider of omnichannel communication, companies will have a complete view of the customer journey to understand where the experience can be improved, friction points, and churn triggers. They can then target and personalise communications to include both CPaaS and CCaaS elements across a plethora of channels.

The benefit of managing omnichannel communications from a single platform is that user verification can be built into the customer journey. This could be via multi-touch authentication techniques such as Two-Factor-Authentication (2FA), a highly effective method that customers know how to use, and it reassures them that they’re being protected.

Through effective partnership programmes, enterprise communication providers are able to assist partners to help their business customers become connected brands, providing world-class personalised omnichannel connections to end-users.

Partnership programmes allow companies to amplify their customers’ digital transformation journey and simplify communication. What’s more, partnering with an enterprise communication solution provider enhances a company’s ability to acquire, activate, retain and grow its customer base.

Final words

As organisations are increasingly looking for better ways to control costs, manage complexity and improve productivity, communications are evolving rapidly to meet these needs. More and more solution providers are having conversations with customers to address communication strategies over channels such as SMS, USSD, and WhatsApp as modern customers expect businesses to be available anytime, anywhere, and on their preferred channel. To succeed in that, sometimes all it needs is the right partner.

Written by James Gachie, Partnership Development Manager at Infobip.