What is Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS)?

Contact centers play a pivotal role in any company’s customer experience, retention and acquisition strategies. However, not all are willing or entirely capable of managing their own in-house contact center to handle direct communication with their customers. This is precisely where Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) is a valuable option.

CCaaS helps companies remain competitive with their customer service and outreach efforts by outsourcing the implementation of the required technology and maintenance. In the coming years, contact center industry standards will continue to evolve, and customers are likely to grow ever more demanding of stellar service at a multitude of touchpoints — even from fresh-faced startups. AI-enhanced customer-facing support solutions and broader analytics applications, among other things, are set to have a big impact on the industry for some time, followed by even more imaginative innovations down the line.

Whitepaper

How to Drive Business Improvements with Customer Insights

Learn how powerful customer feedback can be leveraged far beyond the contact center.

CCaaS ensures such shifting trends in customer communication do not catch companies off guard, freeing their core team members to focus on strategic development instead of implementing novel technologies for customer service management, call handling and other tangential concerns.

What CCaaS means

CCaaS is a deceptively simple concept of full-featured outsourcing of all contact center obligations to a third-party service provider. However, in reality, CCaaS simply outsources the infrastructural elements of your contact center to a provider; you still need to have a team of agents available to answer calls and communicate with people on the line.

CCaaS helps companies decouple their customer communication efforts from the technological foundation they depend on to function. Providers of CCaaS make it possible for businesses of all sizes to access cutting edge IT infrastructure without footing the full bill for such state of the art technology. From excellent hardware and a crystal-clear VOIP network to communications software beefed up by carefully honed AI in the form of chatbots and more, the utility companies have access to through CCaaS is far-reaching and affordable.

Benefits of CCaaS

The benefits of leveraging CCaaS to power your contact center operations range from improved customer experiences to multiple communication channels being open for use without additional integrations or costs. Here are a few of the most important benefits you should know about if you are considering adopting a CCaaS alternative to an in-house, on-premises contact center:

• Improved agent experience – The experiences that your agents have as members of your organization matter. A bad agent experience generally leads to a high churn rate, increasing operational costs and threatening productivity in the process. When valuable customer information is siloed across multiple disconnected systems, agents are often left with little recourse to reconcile the needs of customers with the intel they have on hand, leading to dissatisfaction on both ends of the interaction. CCaaS providers offer streamlined, consolidated systems capable of serving as a single source of each customer's billing and call history as well as other essential intel, equipping agents with everything they need to field calls with confidence.
• Greater scalability - CCaaS providers offer incredible uptime and stability that companies can depend on in a pinch or when they find themselves positioned for sudden growth. Instead of having to commit to a higher monthly or annual premium paid in advance for resources they may or may not need, businesses can instead leverage the inherent flexibility of CCaaS to add or remove agents as needed, paying as they go without costly commitment miscalculations.
• Better reporting - Leading reporting functionality is generally included in a CCaaS package to help companies keep track of their agents' collective performance and more. Full monitoring options are often available to help team leaders keep tabs on customer-agent interactions, and KPIs can be consistently captured as well.
• Enhance data with analytics – Like in any contact center, CCaaS platforms hold a wealth of data related to your customer interactions. This data can be directly connected to and ingested by analytics platforms, like conversation intelligence software, to uncover insights and intelligence that can make it easier to improve CX, agent experience, and other business metrics.

Tips to get the most out of CCaaS investments

CCaaS can be a powerful alternative for businesses to adopt when the traditional approach to managing an agent call center does not align with their needs. However, there are a few things that companies can do to further enhance the benefits brought forth by outsourcing their contact center infrastructure. Here are a few great ideas to consider for your own organization's CCaaS adoption strategy:

• Pair CCaaS with UCaaS - Unified communications as a service (UCaaS) make it easy to join a variety of communication channels, including email and social media, into a single system. This makes communicating with customers across channels much easier for your agents and brings about all of the benefits inherent to omnichannel communication strategies in general.
• Choose a CCaaS solution with enhanced call routing - Powerful, automated call routing functionality makes it possible to assign ideal agents for each customer's query at scale, improving the customer experience and that of each agent as well.

Besides the above, you should always consult with your agents and team leaders to find out what might make their jobs easier. Matching CCaaS providers' offerings with your team's actual needs is generally a winning strategy for adopting this powerful cloud call center software.