What is CCaaS?

What is CCaaS and how does it improve customer experience?

With customer experience now vital to business success, organizations need to go above and beyond to ensure they are delivering on expectations. This is why more and more organizations are investing in cloud Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) solutions. Globally, the CCaaS market is projected to treble in size from $4.87 billion in 2022 to $15.07 billion by 2029.

In essence, a CCaaS solution enables organizations to handle all customer interactions through a single, cloud-based platform. Typically, it supports communication through a range of channels such as voice, chat, SMS, email, social media, and other media, such as video.

Generally, a CCaaS solution includes Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) along with omnichannel support, analytics and reporting. Integration with other systems such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) enable greater efficiency and empower agents with access to the information they need to operate effectively.

Because CCaaS solutions are subscription based, you only pay for what you need. This means they help reduce the cost and complexity of delivering customer service compared with on-premise offerings. In turn, this reduces IT and maintenance budgets. CCaaS solutions are also scalable, meaning you can adjust resources to meet your needs without hardware capacity limitations. They are also easy to customize, allowing organizations to seamlessly add new functionality and innovations to improve the experience they deliver to customers.

Why is CCaaS important?

Every sector faces volatility and change due to global trends, such as inflation, supply chain disruptions or unexpected events. Equally, customer needs and demands are rapidly evolving. For example, customer queries are becoming more complex, and people have higher expectations in terms of speed of service.

All this ratchets up the importance of customer service, making it business critical. Customers increasingly judge the organizations they do business with by the quality of the experience they provide. This means service levels make the difference between retaining or losing customers and revenues. At the same time, companies need to deliver cost effective Customer Experience (CX) while streamlining their operations. CCaaS solutions enable companies to tackle these CX challenges head on. For example, customer service teams can use these solutions to break down silos between departments and channels to improve service levels, boost efficiency through automation and embrace AI to harness innovation.

Understanding the benefits of CCaaS

CCaaS solutions help organizations deliver better customer service and elevate the overall customer experience in a number of ways.

• Meeting customer expectations: CCaaS solutions provide a full range of omnichannel capabilities which can be customized to your company and your customers’ needs.
• Embrace innovation: they make it easier to add new features, functionality, channels, and capabilities.
• Make remote working easy for users: CCaaS solutions are cloud-based, so agents can work from anywhere and benefit from the same user experience as if working from the office.
• Ensure optimal reliability: your provider guarantees and delivers high levels of uptime, complete with redundancy and backup to ensure uninterrupted service.
• Provide cost certainty: you pay only for what you need with no large upfront costs for hardware or software licenses.
• Quickly scale up service levels: businesses can increase capacity rapidly and easily to meet demand, such as by adding more agent licenses. A CCaaS solution therefore gives you the agility and flexibility to respond to changing market conditions.
• Free up IT teams: the task of updating and maintaining a CCaaS solution is handled by the vendor. This allows your IT team to focus on other business-critical areas.
• Increase security: cloud providers invest heavily in security infrastructure and dedicated teams. This ensures that CCaaS solutions deliver the highest level of protection.

How to start with CCaaS

Many organizations have invested heavily in on-premise contact center hardware and software. However, the beauty of a CCaaS solution is that you can deploy it quickly. So, an effective way to transition to CCaaS is to adopt a hybrid approach. You can deploy new functionality via CCaaS while existing legacy systems remain on-premise until it’s time to replace them.

Meeting changing customer expectations is vital to every organization. You need a flexible contact center technology infrastructure that is able to drive customer service excellence, cost effectively. It has to deliver across every channel, be agile, while supporting future innovation. A CCaaS solution provides everything you need to deliver effective, efficient, and high-quality service. All through a single, reliable, secure, and scalable platform delivered across your organization.