The announcement that Zoom is acquiring Five9 got me thinking (again) about the role of communications in the overall digital experience. Over the past nearly year and a half of learning to manage customer and employee relationships online in response to the Covid crisis, the understanding of what services a digital business platform should offer is clearer. Communications must be a part of any successful business platform deployment.

The Problem

Most communication tools and access to channels show up in the business’ existing business applications like customer service, marketing automation, etc. The problem with that though, is that in general the communications are siloed to the specific function of the application and can’t be extended across the business. Silo’ed applications with silo’ed commutation capabilities hinder or prevent consistent messaging, consistent channel availability and internal collaboration around a specific issue. The same is true of single communication channel tools as well. When it comes to communications with customers, silos are inherently “bad”.

To successfully connect with your customers you need to have a flexible online communications infrastructure to accommodate the customers’ choices of channel (and shifting of channel as the conversation progresses). In other words, the customer is in control of when, where and whether they connect and interact with you. Pushing, or trying to push customers to the channel you prefer has mixed results at best. Some customers will be fine with your preferred channel of course, but others will not and might demonstrate their discontent by turning to your competitor who offers the channel they prefer.

Employees are in a somewhat different situation, at least as far as channel choice is concerned. Most businesses provide (now at least) some portfolio of internal collaboration tools to enable the remote worker. The suite of tools likely includes some form of business instant messaging (IM) / chat, email, calendaring, video conferencing, collaborative work, virtual whiteboard, project management and probably a few other tools. Employees will choose what channel and tools they prefer, but the company can help with adoption of company preferred tools by ensuring that the channels have important company communications / content posted / shared regularly.

The silo issue with customer communications extends back into employees though. It is actually the other end of the problem; interacting with customers needs to be seamless across the organization to provide the best experience. The back end systems need to facilitate contextual customer interactions and keep that context across any internal handoffs. To complicate this though, that context also needs to survive across channels.

A Platform Approach

The individual application silo’ed comms approach then, is problematic for building the best CX. There are companies taking a different approach to the problem by providing a broader cloud communication platform (CCP). This emerging platform approach seems to be fueling both launching new platform features and also expanding the platform through acquisitions. The platform providers are coming at the solution from different directions based on their starting point of course, and to mixed effect.

The term platform is often misused and misunderstood. I like to think of a platform as a set of legos designed to support specific functions (micro-services) that form applications. The lego analogy is important for a couple of reasons, first, legos are interconnected, and in the modern digital business, multiple platforms are needed to build out a full digital business “platform”. Interoperability of the underlying legos is essential to enabling full end-to-end business processes. Secondly there are smaller lego blocks that can be arranged on top of the lego foundation to form useful structures. The same applies to platforms, micro-services are used on top of the foundation (platform) to build out the business processes enabled by the functionality of the platform.

Cloud communication platforms then, provide the communication infrastructure and security behind all the other business platforms that make up your digital business. Using this approach lets you leverage advanced communication APIs and security features to extend the customer connectivity and interaction strategy across the entire business. That approach creates a much more effective, complete and impactful set of connection capabilities.

Cloud communication platforms (CCP) are an important component of a modern digital business platform. If you want to learn more about CCPs and for help selecting and implementing contact us.