Flexibility. Scalability. Easy deployment across numerous sites. Seamless integration between external and internal communications. Painless connectivity for all the channels your customers are using. Simple, predictable costs.
There are many good reasons for running a contact centre system in the cloud. The examples above are just some of the attractions which are helping the cloud contact centre market grow at an estimated CAGR of 25 per cent.
But what exactly does contact centre-as-a-service (CCaaS) involve? Are these separate, specialist services which run alongside the rest of your UC infrastructure? Or is it possible to run contact centre systems within broader cloud UC or productivity suites, like Microsoft Skype for Business Online or Office 365?
This is a something global hosted UC provider West Unified Communications Services – West UC, for short – specialises in. Offering complete end-to-end /unified-communications/ucaas solutions across conferencing, collaboration and voice, West has won accolades for the way its services streamline internal and external comms.
In particular, its hosted contact centre solutions are widely acclaimed, helping the company earn a ranking as Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant six years in a row. These services include specialist contact centre solutions for Skype for Business Online.
To get some answers to some important questions we spoke West’s own Enda Kenneally, VP Sales & Business Development and Charlie Doubek, VP Product and Sales Engineering.
Enda Kenneally explained some of the attractions and challenges of running contact centre solutions through Skype for Business Online: “Understandably, many businesses want to take advantage of having a cloud-based voice solution and the features offered by Microsoft with Skype for Business. However, they also need an enterprise-grade voice solution that includes voice gateway, PCI compliance and the contact centre element.
“West is the first Microsoft partner to achieve full native integration of a cloud contact centre platform into Skype for Business. This enables customers to move their entire telephony environment, including the contact centre, to the cloud and benefit from the associated cost savings, productivity and efficiency gains and customer experience improvements.”
The West CCaaS solution
Although Skype for Business Online does support connectivity to the PSTN phone network and functions as a comprehensive cloud PBX for call management, it does not provide specific contact centre functions such as supervisor monitoring and queue management. Nor does it support call recording and PCI-DSS compliance.
West provides all of these with its Cloud Contact Pro product. Cloud Contact Pro is a hosted multichannel contact centre platform for inbound, outbound and blended operations. It allows clients to design their own call flows, leverage expertise across a business for customer service with intelligent routing, and delivers powerful analytics and reporting options.
It makes these features available through Skype for Business Online by integrating with the in-built Office 365 Phone System and PSTN Calling plan. Once it is configured with Skype for Business, end users sign in to a browser-based Cloud Contact Pro portal, but then make or receive calls via the Skype for Business client app.
Call recording is fully integrated with Cloud Contact Pro, but it can also be deployed as a stand-alone feature for Skype for Business Online without the rest of the contact centre suite. All recording is PCI-DSS and HIPAA compliant, including full security protection and auditing capabilities.
Creating a Skype for Business Contact Centre
As a fully hosted service, Cloud Contact Pro is a cost-effective contact centre solution with zero capital costs, no need for complex on-premises installation and staging, and no ongoing maintenance costs.
Combined with Skype for Business Online, it provides a thoroughly modern contact centre solution, making full use not only of Microsoft’s enterprise-class cloud PBX and versatile UC tools, but also connecting to the industry-leading Dynamics CRM and the rest of the Office 365 suite.
Enda believes one of the big benefits of Skype for Business as a contact centre platform is the ready-made connection it creates with everyone in an organisation. This means that customer service can be elevated to a core frontline activity making best use of expertise throughout a business, therefore adding genuine value.
“It’s important to identify which aspects of the business are considered a contact centre, as many customers will imagine a contact centre to be a room with lots of people on the phone. In reality, a contact centre comprises every point of the customer journey where you want to provide automation or drive efficiencies.
“The next step is to work closely with the Skype for Business team to understand the areas of the contact centre that could be finessed for both the customer and agent.”
Once the overall architecture of where contact services need to be located in the business, and how that can be achieved with Skype for Business, it is then a matter of configuring the technology accordingly.
“West strives to understand every aspect of a customer’s environment through an exhaustive engagement methodology to ensure the right connectivity and infrastructure for a Skype solution. We then use a number of different tools that allow us to go through bandwidth calculations, persona types and modalities within Skype for Business.
“This allows us to get an idea of the bandwidth requirements on a site-by-site basis and ultimately ensure the best customer experience. We find if you start with the network and build with Skype For Business or Teams in mind so the contact centre and UC layer user experience is best in class, the adoption will help drive ROI long after the initial roll out.”
Hybrid contact centres
Finally, although Cloud Contact Pro and other West solutions are entirely cloud based, Charlie Doubek recognises that on-premises systems continue to have a role to play in UC, and explains how Cloud Contact Pro can also be used to create hybrid contact centre solutions with Skype for Business server edition.
“Customers remain hesitant to move their entire business to the cloud, but technology is changing fast and it’s therefore critical to select the right solution with the right roadmap tailored to the needs of the business. For example, if you opt for on-premises, will your solution have longevity and support things like Microsoft Teams in the future?
“Recognising that each business has different requirements, West integrates with on-premises equipment to support a hybrid environment. This provides customers with the latest features and flexibility offered by the cloud, while ensuring that core on-premise voice components are fully integrated and benefit from West’s expertise in maximising customer satisfaction across the whole voice infrastructure.
“GDPR is proving a key consideration for European-based organisations, and due to fears around compliance, we’re seeing a trend towards keeping customer data on-premises. Being able to support on-premise through this hybrid approach has allowed West to allay any security concerns, as well as meet the flexibility of all GDPR services that Microsoft Azure offers.”
