WebRTC turns services into features

Telephony and communications used to be services, but WebRTC has turned them into features inside other services.

[In this list of short articles, I’ll be going over some WebRTC related quotes and try to explain them]

Telephony and communication used to be services.

Need a phone system for your company? Go to your carrier, and they’ll set you up with a solution. Maybe install a PBX or even host one “in the cloud” for you.

The thing is, what you got was a full fledged service from a communication vendor. You had your own service, and your phone service. They were unlikely to be really connected to each other.

Then came along CPaaS vendors and communication APIs. You could purchase phone numbers and automate and route them anyway you wanted programmatically. In some ways, you could connect it to your own service logic, but only to a certain degree. If you had a call center agent who needed to answer a phone, you had to give him a physical phone (or install a softphone application for him), as well as the CRM application he interacted with in order to assist people calling in.

Two separate services.

Communications and Customer Relation Management (CRM).

WebRTC changes all that

Since WebRTC runs inside a browser, it lets you place the communication part right there in the browser, where all your other services live already.

It means that now that “telephony service” you had can be added as a feature inside your CRM.

But it gets better.

It doesn’t need to be a CRM you integrate it with. It can be a dating service. A gaming experience where you need to communicate with others during the game. A doctor visit at the virtual clinic. Remotely driving a car. Gambling online. The list goes on.

The main attraction isn’t the communication, but rather the service you are there to use. It so happens to need the ability to communicate using voice or video in real time, but that’s just a detail - a feature - no longer the service itself.

And that’s the real paradigm shift that WebRTC has brought with it.

👉 My free WebRTC for Business People report is a great place to dive deeper into what WebRTC is and the changes it brings with it - the ecosystem around it and what companies are doing with it. Check it out.