A Guide to Comparing CCaaS Platforms in 2022

The contact centre continues to be the central point of connection between businesses and their customers. With the right technology, companies can accelerate sales, deliver exceptional service, and support their target audience. In today’s agile and evolving world, the best contact centre platform is often also the most flexible one.

CCaaS, or Contact Centre as a Service solutions, give companies the power to access all the functionality they need for excellent CX in the cloud. As of 2020, the contact centre as a service market was valued at around $3.48 billion, and now it’s growing at a CAGR of 15.7%.

Since the pandemic in particular, companies have realised just how important it is to access the right selection of innovative tools in an agile environment. The question, is, as the CCaaS market continues to grow, and new platforms emerge, how do you make sure you’re choosing the right one?

Here are some top tips for comparing CCaaS platforms in 2022.

Step 1: Start with the Basics

An excellent CCaaS platform still needs access to all the features you consider to be essential to your contact centre. With that in mind, start by asking yourself what the “must-have” components are for your brand.

Now customers are expecting to be able to interact with companies on a range of channels, you’ll need to ensure your CCaaS solution can align conversations across all of the avenues your clients will be using. Look for things like SMS, chat, and video as well as voice. Other “basics” to consider include:

• Voice quality and reliability: Your contact centre platform vendor should be able to deliver a consistent level of excellent voice (and video) quality, as well as a strong guaranteed uptime. Look for a great SLA for peace of mind.
• Geographic redundancy: Find out how your CCaaS solution will ensure you can continue to connect with your customers regardless of what might happen with certain connections. A high level of redundancy, as well as control over where data travels will be crucial for many companies in today’s flexible CX landscape.
• Security: How does your CCaaS provider ensure your contact centre remain secure? Are there specific tools in place to protect your work-from-home team members if you’re running a remote workplace? What controls are in place for data management?

Step 2: Consider your UCaaS/CCaaS Connection

As more of the tools and technology today’s team members rely on transitions into the cloud, we’re seeing a lot of overlap between “as a service” offerings. A number of platform providers in the CCaaS world also allow you to integrate your contact centre with your UCaaS environment.

While this connectivity might not be necessary for every business, it often helps to have your collaboration and communication tools in the same environment as your contact centre. Combining UCaaS and CCaaS can align more of your team members, particularly in a world of hybrid and remote work. It also provides you with an easier way to track crucial metrics, and better security, because you have fewer apps to monitor.

If you already have a UCaaS system, or you’re moving UC into the cloud at the same time as your contact centre, it’s worth looking for a platform that combines both worlds.

Step 3: Ensure Ease-of-Use and Convenience

With today’s team members now working in a wide range of different environments, it’s more important than ever for businesses to be able to deploy, manage and monitor contact centre tools with ease. Choosing a CCaaS platform that’s easy to provision and deploy remotely will be critical to enabling your evolving team, and minimising initial costs.

Aside from being easy to provision, your CCaaS should also be easy enough for your employees to adopt. Think about how you can prioritize the employee experience by making it quick and simple for your team members to customise their CCaaS interface and get access to the tools you need.

To make life easier for everyone, it’s often a good idea to look into your integration options with CCaaS too. Being able to link things like CRM technology, workforce management tools, and service desk solutions with your contact centre saves a lot of time for your team members. If your service can integrate with features like Salesforce and Zendesk, your staff won’t have to spend as much time moving between apps when working.

Step 4: Consider Innovative New Features

Once you’ve got the essential features of your contact centre nailed down, and you’ve ensured the platform is easy to adopt for your entire team, the next step is comparing the availability of innovative, disruptive tools. For years now, customer experience has stood out as the best way for businesses to differentiate themselves from other brands.

With the right innovative tools, you can boost your chances of outshining the competition, empower your team, and even save money in the long-term. For instance, some of the innovations you may want to ensure you can access include:

• AI: Artificial intelligence, in the form of automated bots to accompany your team and deliver self-service support to employees, can be extremely useful for the CCaaS environment. They help you to deliver faster results to customers and take pressure off your employees. AI can also help you to enhance your analytics, with sentiment and predictive analysis.
• Automation: Autoamtion can also boost team productivity, by reducing the amount of time staff need to spend on repetitive tasks. Look for tools which allow you to automate everything from recording conversations, to transcribing discussions, and routing calls. Automatic screen-pops with access to customer information can even lead to more contextual conversations.
• Workforce management tools: Workforce management tools and workforce engagement tools are growing increasingly essential in the CCaaS world, particularly with the rise of remote work. Consider looking for a platform with these tools already built-in.

Don’t forget to consider reporting and analytical tools too, as these can help you with mapping customer journeys, and supporting your contact centre team.

Comparing CCaaS platforms in today’s competitive landscape might seem complex, but if you follow the four steps above, you should be able to make the right choice.