Is Your Contact Center Stuck in the Early 2000s? Here Is Why You Need to Make That Switch to CCAAS.

When cell phones first came out, I was thrilled with my feature phone. It made calls, sent texts, and stored contacts—what more did I need?

Then came the flip phone. Sleeker, but not smarter. I still bought it. Today, I can’t imagine using either. The way I use my phone has changed completely.

Traditional contact centers are like those old phones. They still work—but in a world of AI, voice analytics, video calls, and intelligent routing, they’re outdated.

That’s where Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) comes in—modern, connected, and built for today

What Is Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS)?

CCaaS is a cloud-based customer experience solution that allows businesses to deploy, operate, and scale their contact center infrastructure without owning the physical technology.

It combines voice, email, chat, SMS, WhatsApp, web, mobile, and social media channels into one centralized omnichannel contact center platform that is delivered over the Internet.

Besides these channels, you get to have a menu of options in terms of contact center features that you want to have. Not every contact center needs every feature the platform offers.

With CCaaS, you can pick and choose what you want. For instance, look at our platform, which has the following features:

• Reporting and Business Intelligence (BI)
• Workforce Management (WFM)
• List Management Services (LMS)
• Voice Analytics
• Call recording
• Screen recording
• Integrations with industry-leading CRMs and other best-of-breed systems
• AI assistants

Not every contact center would require the entire bouquet of our service offerings. With CCaaS, they can pick and choose what they want and pay for its use as and when they subscribe to that feature.

In simple terms, you subscribe to the contact center features you need, run them through a browser, and let the provider manage the complexity behind the scenes.

Why Is There a Need for Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS)?

Do you remember the last time you reached out to the customer service team of any of your vendors? Do you remember the channel you used to reach out to them? Was it through voice, email, chat, or DM on Instagram or WhatsApp?

I am sure that most of us don’t remember the response to any of these questions. However, our expectations of customer service and customer experience have considerably changed. We want to have a consistent experience across all of these channels.

Imagine your traditional contact center infrastructure’s ability to meet these customer expectations. It would definitely have the following challenges:

• Inability to quickly adapt to changing customer expectations
• It would require costly upgrades and maintenance
• Lack of AI-driven features that customers now expect
• Struggle with remote agent support and disaster recovery

With CCaaS, all of these can be easily addressed, as it is designed for the needs of customers.

Let me give you an example.

When the pandemic set in, we migrated thousands of agents in the banking, insurance, and financial services industry to work from home within 24 to 48 hours with our CCaaS platform.

Initially, they were hesitant to migrate from their on-premise infrastructure as they were worried about the sanctity of their data in a cloud environment.

With the pandemic, they were looking at moving their agents to work from home. Their on-premise contact center providers said that it would take a minimum of four months for them to do this migration.

The only option they had was to use a VPN connectivity to work from home. This solution was prohibitively expensive and bandwidth-intensive. They were worried about the quality of service.

That’s when they evaluated our solution, and we helped them migrate all their agents to work from home in no time. Since then, they have been on our platform.

What Are the Core Features of Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS)?

Functional Features

• Handle inbound queries, proactive outbound calls, or a smart mix based on customer needs using inbound, outbound, and blended dialers.
• Route calls efficiently based on agent skills, availability, customer history, and location using intelligent call routing and distribution.
• Interactive Voice Response (IVR) allows you to customize and configure voice menus and self-service options without any effort.
• Manage high call volume while keeping customers informed and engaged with call queuing.
• Record interactions for quality assurance, compliance, and training purposes with call and screen recording capabilities.
• Offer a single view of all customer interactions across all channels and interfaces using omnichannel capabilities.

CCaaS customers, on average, manage 6.31 channels compared to just 4.71 channels with on-premise setups. 

Advanced Capabilities

• Workforce Management (WFM): Forecast staffing needs, manage shits, and monitor adherence in real-time.
• Workforce Optimization (WFO): Enhance agent performance through quality monitoring, coaching, and performance analytics.
• List Management Services (LMS): Organize and automate outreach with dynamic list loading, prioritization, and scrubbing tools.
• Business Intelligence and Analytics: Use real-time dashboards, custom reporting, historical reports, and trend analysis to drive better results and decisions.

Integrations

• Pre-built integrations with industry-leading tools like Salesforce, Zendesk, Zoho, Freshdesk, Leadsquared, and ServiceNow, among others.
• Easily plug into your broader IT ecosystem with secure and flexible APIs

Top 5 Benefits of Using CCaaS?

Infrastructure Is Not Your Problem

You can forget about servers, storage, and software updates. You don’t need an IT team to manage your contact center infrastructure, which will allow them to focus on growth. Your CCaaS provider will handle everything 24×7, including maintenance, upgrades, patches, security, and infrastructure monitoring.

Pay-as-You-Go

Have you heard of this before? No minimum guarantees, no long-term contracts, and no upfront CapEx. You only pay for what you use with the flexibility to scale agents and features up or down per your business needs.

Easy Integrations Are Directly Proportional to Better Customer Experience (CX)

CCaaS platforms connect easily to your CRM, helpdesk, ticketing, and business apps with pre-built and API-based integrations. This helps you create seamless customer journeys and a smoother agent experience.

Better Decisions, Faster Resolutions, and Smarter Service

With CCaaS, you can access powerful features like real-time analytics, sentiment analysis, and AI-generated agent assistance that allow you to make informed decisions.

Enterprise-Grade Security

CCaaS providers are staffed with dedicated security experts who help harden and protect the infrastructure against known and unknown threats.

For most infrastructure providers, data encryption, always-on monitoring, and threat detection are housekeeping activities. Besides, they help with compliance with global standards like GDPR, HIPAA, TCPA, CCPA, and PCI-DSS. 

Besides, CCaaS dramatically reduces your total ownership cost due to reduced hardware and software costs, IT staffing needs, reduced maintenance overheads, and reduced downtime and upgrade disruptions.

Would you believe that you don’t have to worry about end-of-life and unsupported software versions?

Your entry barriers are completely removed with CCaaS, and irrespective of your size, CCaaS delivers enterprise-level experiences.

CCaaS is just not an upgrade. It’s a rethink.

Can you imagine a customer experience function without CCaaS?

CCaaS is all about flexibility and intelligence. It is about meeting your customers where they are and not where your legacy systems say they should be.

Your competitors may already be using it. So, move your infrastructure to CCaaS, for it would help you provide exceptional customer experiences without bleeding opportunities and leaving money on the table.

Are you still going to keep the flip phone or switch to a smartphone?