Contact Centre as a Service solutions or “CCaaS” technology is the hottest investment for CX right now. As companies continue to strive to deliver the best possible experiences to their clients, the flexibility of CCaaS and a cloud model make it easier to stay competitive.
In the past, contact centres were expensive, often over-complicated solutions that required excessive investment, maintenance, and on-premises expense. Now that we’re moving into a cloud-based world, CCaaS gives businesses the freedom to unlock new levels of business continuity and growth. You could even design your own intelligent contact centre, complete with natural language processing and sentiment analysis.
Today, we’re going to explore some of the ways you can upgrade your contact centre to CCaaS with a focus on leveraging better business growth.
1. Enable Hybrid Working
Perhaps one of the main reasons why many companies have shifted to the cloud and CCaaS market in recent years has been the need for more flexible working practices. When the pandemic hit in 2020, most companies discovered that their contact centres weren’t prepared for an environment where employees couldn’t necessarily share the same space.
CCaaS gives organisations the freedom to prepare for a more flexible, remote workforce. With a CCaaS offering, business leaders can ensure every team member has access to the tools they need to deliver amazing customer experiences, regardless of where they are. Employees can log into secure calling systems and interact with clients through a shared business number. There are even workforce management tools available to ensure ongoing productivity.
Enabling hybrid working in your CCaaS means ensuring that your staff have the tools they need to thrive in any space. However, it’s also important to think about how you’re going to manage and motivate those hybrid workers. Workforce Optimization tools, real-time analytics systems that track agent performance, and even wallboard or dashboard technology will be essential going forward.
2. Access Integrations
Different customers demand different experiences. Companies are beginning to recognise that if they want to stay ahead of the competition, they need to respond to the unique needs of their clients. This means creating a custom-build CCaaS solution that’s built to solve specific problems.
Today’s CCaaS offerings are becoming increasingly flexible, paving the way to things like UCaaS and CCaaS connections, so that the front and back end of your company can remain connected at all times. There are also various integrations available for things like call recording solutions for compliance, or security services for client privacy.
Before implementing a CCaaS solution, companies will need to ensure that their offering is flexible enough to allow for all the integrations and connections that suit them. Pay extra focus to integrations with things like UC technology, CRM, workforce management tools, and intelligent analytics.
3. Go Omni-channel
The flexibility of the CCaaS environment allows companies to scale and expand in a range of different ways. In the contact centre environment, you can use the cloud to add new staff members at the touch of a button or provision new tools to your workers wherever they are. However, there’s also another way to expand your contact centre – through new channels.
Today’s customers are interacting with companies through a host of different channels, ranging from SMS and mobile apps to social media, instant chat solutions and even video. If you want to give your clients the best experience and watch your business grow as a result, you need to be available on the right platforms.
Start by ensuring you have a good idea of where your customers most want to interact with your brand. Client research and insights from your sales and marketing team should be able to help with this. When you know which channels matter to your teams, make it easy for your employees to man these environments on a simple, single-pane-of-glass environment on the back end. The easier and more intuitive the contact centre is, the better.
4. Access In-Depth Analytics
Because CCaaS allows you to connect multiple channels for customer contact, it can do a lot more than just give your employees a single pane of glass to work with. With all your communications systems connected, you get a better end-to-end view of your customer’s journey. Implementing analytics tools will help you to understand exactly what’s happening in your contact centre.
The best analytics strategies combine both real-time, and historical insights. Real-time analytics can show your employees and their supervisors how calls are being handled in the moment. It’s possible to track things like call volume and customer sentiment, and supervisors can even drop in on a call if it appears to be going in the wrong direction. Real-time analytics can also be streamed to wallboards and dashboards for hybrid team motivation.
On the other hand, historical analytics allow you to make assumptions about your business performance over the long term. You can predict when the busiest times will be in your schedule based on previous experiences and find trends in customer preferences.
5. Unlock Intelligence and Automation
To really get the most out of your CCaaS environment, you need to be willing to take advantage of all the disruptive technology available in this flexible landscape. CCaaS solutions frequently come with access to AI and automation solutions that can make your life easier and delight your customers. AI integrates seamlessly into CCaaS installations, in the form of intelligent IVRs and natural language processing tools that can transcribe text automatically.
Make sure your CCaaS provider is investing in the cutting edge of intelligent technology, so you can leverage all kinds of updates for your team. You could even look into automating various parts of customers service, like dealing with commonly asked questions through chatbots. The use of AI and automation can reduce the pressure on your sales and service teams, so they can focus on the tasks that really matter.
At the same time, AI solutions speed up the path to resolution for your customers, by giving them new opportunities to serve themselves.
