Some quick history: 10 years ago, I attended a conference called Emerging Communications (eComm). It was an eccentric and inspiring collection of people focussed on the next chapter of voice and telecom technology. (It came on the heels of the “Voice 2.0” movement but with a broader vision.) The shared vision there was that a wave of innovation was coming because communication functionality would soon be as easy to access as web functionality (I’ll circle back to “the vision” at the end of this post).
eComm is now defunct but, if I recall correctly, one of the sponsors at their last show was a new start-up called Twilio. The term “CPaaS” arose a few years later, with Twilio leading the charge. The rest is history. But, in tech, nothing stays still.
What comes next?
A year ago, the CPaaS (Communications Platform as a Service) space seemed settled into comfortable middle-age. Twilio had won the game in terms of “API for sending messages and making calls”. Nexmo had been acquired by Vonage. Tropo by Cisco. Zang by Avaya.
The world of customer service is ever expanding, making it a complicated and dynamic space to navigate. With new communication channels appearing and evolving every year, it’s a challenge to understand how they relate to each other, and how they should work together. New terminology can help our thought process, if we all agree on the meaning. Conversely, ambiguity about words like “digital” or “chat” or “call” makes the navigation harder.
Customers increasingly prefer chat over other communication channels, but chat suffers from an 
Customer service is arguably the single most important aspect of any organization. With that, support departments have to understand how customers wish to communicate in order to be successful.
Messaging is growing at a 
The eternal conflict in customer service is between delivering a good experience and keeping costs low. For example, pushing callers to self-serve IVR lowers cost, but customers hate dealing with phone menus and “talking to the machine”. The industry has always sought a way for customers and companies to interact that is enjoyable for the former and cost effective for the latter. Hopes are high that “messaging” is that messiah.
