What Is a Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS)?

What is CCaaS?

Gartner defines contact center as a service (CCaaS) software as a service (SaaS)-based application that enables customer service organizations to manage multichannel customer interactions holistically in terms of both customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX).

Let us try and extend this definition.

Two enhancements that I would include to the definition are:

1. Change multichannel customer interactions to omnichannel customer interactions. This would allow you to get one view of your customers across all channels.
2. A central hosted point from which all inbound and outbound customer interactions are handled

Why Do You Need CCaaS?

You often end up licensing a cloud call center platform that can do much more than your business needs. It adds to the complexities of implementation and workflow.

CCaaS provides you the option to pick and choose what you need and when you need it. This is the fundamental issue that CCaaS addresses.

Besides, CCaaS platforms are hosted on the cloud, which allows you to access them from anywhere in the world. This makes remote working and hybrid working easily possible, allowing you to recruit talents from around the world.

Integrations with other systems would be easier as CCaaS is on the cloud. It makes it easier for you to offer omnichannel capabilities.

CCaaS will offer you the flexibility of a pay-as-you-go model, where you get the resources per your demand.

Features of Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS)

Popular CCaaS features include inbound, outbound & blended dialers, call queuing, intelligent call routing, ACD, IVR, call recording, screen recording, and reporting.

Besides, it has advanced features like workforce management, workforce optimization, list management services, reporting, analytics, and business intelligence.

Many CCaaS platforms come with pre-built integration and provisions for API integrations with other best-of-breed IT applications.

Knowing that you can pick and choose all of these features for a monthly subscription cost makes it a compelling proposition for customers.

This is something that I wanted to share with you on CCaaS.

On average, organizations that subscribe to CCaaS have 6.31 channels, as opposed to 4.71 for on-premise platforms.

Benefits of Contact Center as a Service

• You don’t have to allocate time and resources to maintain or upgrade the infrastructure. Service providers handle the entire infrastructure for you 24×7
• You can scale up and down the number of agents as well as the features and functionality at the click of a button. There are no minimum guarantees and no contracts to be signed.
• Easily integrable, offering better customer experience (CX) for the end users
• Future-ready with access to advanced features like analytics and intelligence
• You get best-in-class security with experts manning the servers and the hosted infrastructure. Systems are entirely hardened against known attacks and unknown threats.
• Very minimal barriers to entry, and the cost that you would incur on a CCaaS platform would be much lower than an on-premise system
• You don’t have to worry about hardware and software end-of-life, as the service provider handles all of it

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With a CCaaS platform, all you have to do is provide access to a working browser and Internet connectivity for your agents, and your customer experience function is good to go.

If you want additional proof, look at all the traditional contact center platform providers, they talk about offering contact center as a service (CCaaS) today.

This trend is not because the providers chose to go this route but because the customers want to go the CCaaS way.

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