The Cloud has been a powerful tool in the evolution of customer experience and the contact centre. With Cloud technology, companies have access to unlimited flexibility, scalability, and ease of deployment. Through the Cloud, companies can empower agents around the world to continue delivering excellent customer experience wherever they are.
Cloud spaces also make it easy to quickly roll out new capacity and capabilities in the contact centre, without huge initial investments. The most common term associated with the contact centre in the Cloud is “CCaaS” (contact centre as a service). However, CPaaS (Communication platforms as a service) could also be a valuable investment for customer experience.
CCaaS and CPaaS: Understanding the Connection
For decades, most companies were stuck with by-the-book classic contact centres that operated entirely on-premises. In recent years, the evolution of Cloud technology has allowed all kinds of organisations to make the transition into the Cloud, either through hybrid strategies or full migrations. CCaaS, or contact centre as a service solutions, provide access to all of the contact centre functionality a company needs, delivered through a managed cloud service.
The CCaaS environment allows for a much more flexible approach to customer experience, with features and services that organisations can update at a pace that suits them. With CCaaS, you essentially build a new contact centre in the Cloud, which may be able to integrate with some aspects of an on-premises system.
CPaaS, on the other hand, stands for communications platforms as a service. With CPaaS, you can embed new functionality into existing tools. Through application programme interfaces (APIs) and SDKs, it’s possible for companies to build real-time communication systems like voice, video, and messaging into the applications they already use every day.
How CPaaS Enriches the Contact Centre
CPaaS is quickly emerging as a valuable part of the communication stack. Rather than having to build their own communications infrastructure, companies can instead access easy tools that make unlocking new functionality simple. You don’t need extensive developer skills to get involved, and there are even CPaaS providers who can do most of the hard work for you.
In the contact centre, CPaaS can enrich channels of customer communication, offer new opportunities to companies for customer service, and more. For instance, you could use a chat API in CPaaS to make sure that customers can reach out to you for support on the services they already use, like Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp. CPaaS solutions would allow you to add this functionality to the app you already have for your business, so you don’t need to start from scratch.
CPaaS solutions can also implement things like video into your customer experience stack and help with combining multiple channels on an agent back-end, so its easier to track conversations and stay one step ahead of amazing customer engagement. Going forward, CPaaS could be the answer to creating more immersive and unique omnichannel experiences for customers in the age of digital customer service.
