What Contact Center as a Service means for your business

• CCaaS solutions can often exceed the capabilities of on-premise contact center solutions because they are built to be unified, robust, and flexible.
• From disaster recovery, integration of at-home or remote agents, future-proofing through automatic upgrades, and more, CCaaS offerings have redefined the value proposition and changed the game.

Today’s call centers are versatile and scalable, they’re used by every type of business—from e-Commerce startups to huge healthcare corporations, and across all industries. Organizations are fully aware of the importance of running a good contact center and are in earnest transitioning to the cloud. One of the most popular and cost-effective methods to streamline and automate the process is by opting for CCaaS – Contact Center as a Service.

Since its inception almost 20 years ago, Contact Center as a Service was primarily tailored to small-to-medium businesses (SMBs), offering scaled-down features in exchange for convenience and low cost-of-entry. For years, analyst firm Frost & Sullivan defined the cloud or hosted contact centers as a “network-based service in which a service provider owns and operates a contact center technology platform”.

Over time, new advantages of contact center cloud services and hosted services became clear: disaster recovery, integration of at-home or remote agents, future-proofing through automatic upgrades, and more. In a nutshell, CCaaS is a software solution that allows for cloud-based customer support, exceeding the capabilities of on-premise vendors. This means supplying services like automatic call distribution (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR), and analytics to track KPIs and agent call activity. It can save businesses serious time and costs over managing all their software need internally.

CCaaS providers operate through a subscription-licensing model and businesses access the system through the cloud by using an app or a web browser. Like many other software-as-a-service solutions, CCaaS usually counts as an operating expense (OPEX) rather than a capital expense (CAPEX), which some businesses might prefer for accounting purposes. Compared to on-premise call center software, CCaaS offers easier, faster implementation, more flexible scaling, and a lower admin burden.

How can businesses benefit from CCaaS?

First and foremost the cost benefits of using CCaaS are obvious right from the start mainly because business no longer needs to invest in infrastructure. Contact Center as a service does away with the need to invest in routers, servers, and similar infrastructure. The easy pay-per-use model makes it even more attractive as it allows companies to pick and choose the pricing that works for their budget and requirements.

Then there is flexibility since the as-a-service model allows for dynamic scalability. With CCaaS, companies can add agents or deal with sudden workload spikes instantly.  CCaaS allows almost instantaneous ramping up or down resources to match the client’s needs. Organizations can also access real-time monitoring and detailed reports of every part of the contact center. These insights are critical for understanding the gaps in service and productivity of agents, providing a foundation for enacting key changes.

More importantly, excellent customer service is paramount for every business. Contact centers exist to serve customers, but traditional solutions have often seemed to fall short of fulfilling their promise. CCaaS solutions are designed to be customer-centric, and they continue to evolve to fit the way people work and communicate today. 

One final benefit of switching to a cloud-based solution is increased agent productivity. Access to online databases that display customer interaction histories across channels can help agents resolve calls and other customer queries faster. A fully functional CCaaS delivers multichannel integration to let agents field queries from customers’ preferred communication channels, including social media, mobile, live chat, email, and voice calls. Then as mentioned earlier, CCaaS has powerful analytic capabilities that provide actionable call center insights on top of the quick desktop access to all of the tools a service representative needs to satisfy customer issues.