Few things are more important when it comes to delivering the right customer experience, than an effective contact centre. The contact centre represents the central point of connection between your business and your target audience, responsible for everything from sales calls to customer service.
However, for years, contact centre environments have been complex, disjointed, and costly ecosystems of confusing tools, often causing issues for countless brands. Fortunately, the age of “everything as a service” has introduced a new solution.
CCaaS, or Contact Centre as a Service platforms combine the various distributed features of an effective contact centre into an all-in-one cloud environment. With the right tool, you can access PBX functionality, IVR tools, customer data and quality management in the same place.
Currently hurtling towards a value of $11.76 billion by 2028, demand for CCaaS is on the rise. Here’s why you should consider investing in CCaaS platforms this year if you haven’t already.
1. Better Customer Experience
The purpose of the contact centre has always been to deliver an exceptional experience to customers. Unfortunately, the traditional contact centre hasn’t always delivered the best results. From limited communication options to confusing routing strategies and ineffective agents, countless concerns have left customers dreading a conversation with the contact centre.
CCaaS solutions could be the answer to various problems negatively affecting the customer experience. With an all-in-one cloud environment, you ensure your teams have access to all the information they need from multiple environments to answer questions and deliver insights efficiently. The CCaaS environment also allows brands to connect multiple modes of communication for their audience into one environment.
You can interact with your target audience across chat, SMS messaging, social media, video and audio, all while maintaining the same contextual insights from one part of the conversation to the next. This allows customers to get a more relevant and consistent experience, on the channel they prefer to use. Overall, the result is a more streamlined, efficient, and customer-first service.
2. Improved Employee Experience
It’s not just customers that benefit from the synergistic experience the CCaaS platform offers. As we continue to accelerate towards a hybrid working future, the cloud-based CCaaS platform is rapidly becoming a must-have, to provide teams with an all-in-one pane of glass for productivity.
CCaaS solutions combine all the information your teams need to do their best work in the same system, so they can waste less time sifting through various apps to find the data they need. CCaaS solutions also provide back-end access to various tools which help to empower your average worker, from AI assistants to help with seeking out information, to CRM integrations.
A powerful CCaaS environment makes it easier for agents to do their job, whether they’re calling a customer about a sale, or dealing with an upset client. Growing integrations between the CCaaS and UCaaS world are even allowing for better collaboration between teams in the contact centre too.
3. Scalability, Flexibility and Business Continuity
Not only where old-fashioned contact centres rife with problems from a productivity perspective, but they also suffered from a number of issues with lack of scalability and flexibility. In the past, adding new agents to a contact centre or leveraging new features would have required expensive white-glove services and provisioning requirements. With a contact centre environment based in the cloud, it’s much easier to adapt your system to suit your needs.
CCaaS solutions allow companies to adjust access to various tools, deliver new features to employees and even remove agents from their system quickly, and remotely. The same technology can scale easily across multiple countries and communication platforms, adapting to suit the changing needs of your audience.
As an added bonus, CCaaS systems can continue to function and support your employees regardless of what’s happening in a specific geographical location. You can ensure business continuity even in the most complicated circumstances, by ensuring your agents stay active wherever they are. This is something contact centre leaders have begun to see significant value in over recent years.
4. Potential Cost Savings
Making the shift to a new mode of contact centre operations can seem like a complex, time-consuming and expensive process at first. However, companies are quickly discovering that they can actually save money by switching to CCaaS in the long-term.
First, a contact centre system delivered over the cloud eliminates the need for managing and maintaining expensive hardware on-premises. There are virtually no upfront investments, and you won’t need to hire extra IT professionals to keep everything running for you. CCaaS doesn’t require the purchase of additional real estate or servers, and your provider handles most of the hard work for you. At the same time, you can streamline billing by accessing various features from one vendor.
CCaaS solutions also open the door for other cost-saving opportunities. For instance, because your team members can operate from anywhere, you don’t have to pay as many overheads for physical contact centres. What’s more, if something changes in your company, you can scale up or down as needed, paying only for what you use.
5. Improved Business Intelligence
Finally, CCaaS solutions unify all of your conversations with customers into a central environment. This makes it much easier to get a clear view of the customer journey, your customer service processes, and more. Many CCaaS solutions come with reporting and analytics solutions built-in, making it easier to understand your customers and what drives their purchasing decisions.
You can track important metrics from across a range of different platforms, and even record calls for future training requirements. In some cases, you might even be able to implement innovative tools like AI analytics for predictive insights into your customer’s needs.
CCaaS solutions can help you to learn more about your companies and customers from historical reports, or allow you access to real-time analytics which could help you to resolve a problem faster when something happens to influence call quality or customer sentiment. With the right insights, you’re better equipped to impress your audience and earn their loyalty.
