Contact Center as-a-Service (CCaaS) solutions are becoming the preferred deployment model for businesses of all sizes and all industries. In fact:
- By 2022, contact center as a service will be the preferred adoption model in 50% of contact centers, up from approximately 10% in 2019[1]
- By 2023, customers will prefer to use speech interfaces to initiate 70% of self-service customer interactions, rising from 40% todaa [2]
What is CCaaS?
Contact Center-as-a-Service (CCaaS) is a SaaS-based application that enables customer service organizations to manage multichannel customer interactions from a customer-centric perspective. CCaaS solutions offer similar functional capabilities to on-premise contact centers. Key differences include geographic flexibility – CCaaS can be staffed by remote teams. Also, CCaaS solutions are delivered via the Cloud, so they have access to more customers insights and integrate easily with other cloud-based apps. Finally, CCaaS solutions cost less and have fast deployment times; you can launch a CCaaS in as little as two days!
Designed specifically for customer service teams, support centers, and help desk service centers, CCaaS connect businesses with their customers and deliver five key customer service capabilities:
- Smart, interactive voice response (IVR)
- The ability to easily deploy complex routing workflows
- Blended routing and queuing of voice and digital channels such as email, web chat, SMS, and more
- Proactive contact including outbound dialing and SMS, as well as push text and email notifications
- Call / Interaction monitoring in real time training opportunities
CCaaS provide the ability to scale service requirements up and down, managing customer multiple communication channels.
Why CCaaS Now? Because it’s all about the Customer
Call centers have evolved as more channels have become available for customers. Companies need the ability to provide non-voice communication channels - email, web chat, SMS, and more.
Interestingly, voice-based customer interactions still make up a significant portion of interactions in contact centers today. As a result of the pandemic, phone calls have reemerged as the “front door” to most businesses. When you look for a CCaaS vendor, ensure they provide both voice and nonvoice channels to reduce technical complexity. In addition, CCaaS solutions should provide for complex routing and workflows, interaction queuing, escalation as well as remote monitoring capabilities for management.
Top Five Benefits of CCaaS
- A move from CAPEX to OPEX. Older on-premises platforms often require expensive upgrades in hardware, phone systems and facility costs.
- You can augment your existing on-premise contact center capacity. If you are fully invested in your existing contact centers but need to grow quickly and easily, CCaaS can augment your existing capabilities and staff.
- Reduce and shift the complexity of supporting contact center IT from the business to the vendor. IT Support for a contact center including upgrades, patching and license management are no longer your concern.
- Scalability and license flexibility. For contact centers that experience significant seasonality in their staffing requirements, the ability to make monthly adjustments to agent license counts can deliver significant cost savings in some cases. Also, the ability to scale volume up or down in response to the market quickly and inexpensively helps companies meet their customers’ needs without taking on additional cost.
- Rapid deployment. Deployment times for CCaaS solutions are typically much shorter than for on-premise deployments or major upgrades.
Finally, whether you are a small business with five agents or an enterprise with 5000, Contact Centers as-a-Service works for both scenarios and anywhere in between.
The ARCO Group is an IT Services and Support firm that has been involved in providing telephony services when contact centers were still referred to as call centers. ARCO Cloud Contact Center provides a feature-rich cloud-based contact center solution that can be deployed in a little as two days! Contact the ARCO Group to learn more.
[1] 1, 2 Gartner Magic Quadrant Report, 15 October 2019 - ID G00376616