Tag: CCaaS

The Contact Center Upgraded: Everything You Need to Know About Contact Center as a Service (CCaas) | Blog

While organizations are certainly familiar with on-premise technologies in contact centers, today’s enhancement on the premise-based technology model is delivering an exceptional digital customer experience, innovation, flexibility, and lower cost. Meet the Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) operated on the cloud. To learn more about this fast-growing omnichannel cloud contact center solution being adopted across all industries and geographies, read on. 

Contact centers are becoming an area of strategic focus for organizations as they strive to deliver business impact through superior Customer Experience (CX). Traditionally, contact centers have run on technologies hosted on-premise with physical hardware such as servers, storage systems, security systems, dialers, and Private Branch Exchange (PBX) hosted in premises or in-house data centers. But that is changing.

Most organizations are now opting for cloud-based contact center solutions by migrating their existing premise-based applications to cloud and/or deploying cloud-native applications as they look to digitally transform their CX operations. In the past few years, the growing need to quickly deploy contact center technology and the increasing use of digital solutions such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), automation, and analytics has paved the way for a flexible cloud contact center offering called Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS).

With COVID-19 pushing the boundaries of innovation and demand for digitally-infused customer experience increasing, CCaaS is poised to be at the forefront of the digital transformation of contact centers. In this blog, we will explore CCaaS, its impact on customer experience, and the financial benefits from leveraging these solutions.

Understanding CCaaS and what it brings to the table

CCaaS (also known as hosted contact center) is a contact center solution that allows organizations to utilize third-party contact center software hosted on cloud. It provides all the essential components that comprise a conventional contact center such as PBX, Interactive Voice Response (IVR), Automatic Call Distribution (ACD), Computer Telephony Integration (CTI), voice and non-voice channels, along with other digital solutions such as omnichannel platform, workforce management, automation, and quality management. It is usually offered as a subscription-based (per seat, per user, per month, per transaction) model, and the CCaaS vendor is responsible for regular maintenance and upgrades.

How CCaaS impacts customer experience?

With increasing customer expectations of service and support, improved contact center technology has been a key enabler of seamless service delivery. CCaaS brings together all the essential tools and technologies required by contact centers to deliver a superior customer experience. Here are three possible ways CCaaS can positively impact customer experience:

• Less customer effort: Customers expect to connect with brands through multiple communication channels round the clock. Omnichannel solutions provided by CCaaS enable customers to easily connect across any channel at any point in time. Additionally, self-service solutions offered by CCaaS ensure customers’ queries can be solved without human intervention with low customer effort
• Consistent quality of services: Enterprises and service providers are under greater pressure to deliver consistent customer experiences in each interaction. Intelligent routing and agent assist solutions in CCaaS ensure customers are connected to the appropriate agents equipped to handle customers’ issues. It enables organizations to resolve queries as quickly as possible, thus, keeping high customer satisfaction levels
• Personalized experience: Customers these days expect brands to anticipate their needs and make personalized suggestions. CCaaS solutions enable organizations to collect historical data from multiple touchpoints, generate insights, and offer real-time tailor-made solutions to customers. Access to historical data also enables agents to understand the context of customer queries and solve them more easily

Does CCaaS adoption make financial sense?

A key benefit of CCaaS adoption is long-term cost savings. The business case depends on the size of the contact center, existing investments, the propensity to drive value through next-generational technologies, and the nature of the partnership with the CCaaS vendor to drive a successful transformation effort. Let us explore the potential cost savings that contact centers of different sizes can achieve practically:

• Small contact centers with fewer than 300 FTEs can potentially realize 10-25% cost savings after CCaaS adoption. These smaller centers start driving cost benefits by leveraging digital solutions such as omnichannel platform, intelligent routing, workforce management solution, automation, AI/Machine Learning (ML)-based solutions, and advanced analytics along with CCaaS
• Mid-sized contact centers with 300 to 1,500 FTEs can potentially realize 25-40% cost saving after CCaaS adoption. They can achieve economies of scale and drive value through the benefits provided by digital solutions. These contact centers can achieve additional costs savings by sharing IT assets across multiple locations, setting up analytics and automation hubs, and adopting unified operations
• Large contact centers with more than 1500 FTEs can achieve 15-30% cost savings through levers available for small and mid-sized contact centers. However, significant existing investments in software and hardware, disjointed legacy solutions, and rigid operating models often hinder them from making greater savings

Our recent research shows that as companies accelerate their cloud adoption journeys and scale their contact center operations, leveraging an agile and holistic CCaaS solution will increase many-fold. With many companies moving towards flexible business models, the future of CCaaS looks promising.

Do you foresee adopting CCaaS as part of your cloud adoption journey? Read our report Demystifying Contact Center-as-a-Service (CCaaS): Customer Experience Management (CXM) Market Report 2021 and share your thoughts by emailing [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected].