Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS): The Ultimate Guide

Today, customers have multiple channels at their fingertips and businesses that offer prompt services across the channels have a competitive advantage. In fact, 64% of customers expect real-time responses and interactions from companies. 

But how can a business provide consistent 24×7 communication across channels? The solution is to use a Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS).

In this blog post, we explain the CCaaS platform and how it can optimize your contact center operations.

What is Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS)? 

Contact Center as a Service is a cloud-based platform that offers businesses an omnichannel solution for customer communication. It replaces the traditional on-premise setup and enables contact centers to operate remotely. 

The centralized platform streamlines communication across channels like calls, websites, emails, chats, and SMS, enabling a consistent customer journey. This enables businesses to scale customer service operations. 

What are the Benefits of CCaaS?

The contact center as a service is suitable for companies that prioritize frictionless customer-brand interactions and lower operational costs.

Here are the benefits of using CCaaS solutions: 

1. Improves Customer Experience 

Customers expect a brand to provide support using their preferred channel, such as calls, online chatbots, messaging platforms, etc. CCaaS enables businesses to unify and maintain customer conversations across these channels. This allows agents to deliver consistent support at every interaction, exceeding the customer’s expectations.

2. Lowers Operational Costs

Businesses can reduce their contact center operational costs using CCaaS in many ways. First, the solution is hosted on a server, so you don’t need any specialized hardware or physical infrastructure to run it. The solution also comes with all the essential features, so you don’t need to invest in multiple tools for efficient operations. 

3. Enhances Scalability

Using CCaaS solutions, contact centers can smoothly scale operations during seasonal fluctuations or with business growth. It can swiftly and effectively react to disruptions, which helps you add capacity and manage agents as needed. 

4. Enable Work Flexibility 

The CCaaS breaks down silos within the team, allowing employees to access the platform from anywhere and on any device. This allows contact center agents to serve customers without geographical constraints.

5. Increases Productivity

CCaaS platforms come with robust measures like call recording, digital deflections, advanced analytics, and quality management, which helps agents handle customer interactions efficiently and effectively. For example, the agents can reduce repetitive tasks through automated workflows and improve their overall productivity. 

Advantages of CCaaS over On-Premise Contact Center 

Cloud-based CCaaS solutions offer many advantages over traditional on-premises contact centers. Here are some benefits of using CCaaS: 

• Faster deployment than on-premises solutions, which require lengthy installation and configuration
• Keep the contact center up to date with the latest features and security updates without any downtime
• Powerful disaster recovery options and multiple data centers for operational continuity
• Enables contact center agents to work from any location 

CCaaS vs. UCaaS vs. CPaaS: What are the Differences? 

Key Features of Contact Center as a Service 

Call Center as a Service offers end-to-end communication, analysis, and reporting solutions, streamlining every customer interaction and delivering optimal service. Here are some notable features:

1- Omnichannel Customer Engagement

The CCaaS allows customers to contact the business using multiple channels without losing the conversation context. For example, an agent can share necessary information with customers over chat while engaging them in a call. 

2- Digital Deflections

Businesses can deflect incoming inquiries to self-service or personalized support through IVRs (Interactive Voice Response) and chatbots. This helps customers quickly achieve their conversation goal and enables agents to focus only on the critical conversations.

3- Auto-Dialers

They automatically dial phone numbers from a predefined list and connect agents only when a human answers the call. The system uses a predictive algorithm to adjust the dialing rate based on campaign, agent availability, and call duration to ensure efficient call pacing. 

Auto-dialers increase productivity by eliminating manual dialing, reducing idle time, and increasing campaign efficiency. This also reduces wait times and increases call resolution. 

4- Smart Call Routing

CCaaS solutions enable smart routing of inbound calls based on customer history, agent skill set, and language proficiency. It can ensure faster call resolution and response time by assigning incoming calls to available and skilled agents. 

5- AI-based Agent Assist

This feature offers agents real-time guidance when they’re dealing with customers. During a phone call, the platform automatically transcribes the conversation, processes it, and displays related information to solve the queries. This could include customer account-specific details, answers to FAQs and knowledge base, etc.

Therefore, it helps agents to efficiently handle the conversations and deliver seamless customer experiences.

6- Advanced Analytics & Reporting

With CCaaS, you get a suite of analytics and reporting features that help you make data-driven decisions. You can have real-time analysis with a live dashboard, historical reporting, and customer interaction analysis, which offer insights into customer experience across channels and evaluate agent performance.

7- Integrations

You can easily connect a CCaaS platform with other contact center software, such as CRM and website. This helps efficiently manage conversations and provide a unified view of the customer journey. It also provides agents with all the necessary tools and data to offer personalized services. 

How to Implement CCaaS for Your Business? 

Implementing Contact Center as a Service offers enhanced flexibility and scalability. Here’s a step-by-step guide to seamlessly transition to cloud-based contact centers. 

Step 1: Define a Business Goal

Consult with business stakeholders to identify contact center goals. For example, it could be scaling existing operations or implementing new communication channels.  Map out the key metrics that align with the goals to identify the CCaaS provider.

Step 2: Select the Cloud Type

Cloud-based contact centers offer three cloud formats depending on the level of control your business requires:

• Public cloud – It’s a shared infrastructure with limited control. It’s cost-efficient and scalable, ideal for businesses looking to minimize IT expenses.
• Private cloud – It’s a dedicated cloud-infrastructure that provides strict control and security measures. It’s suitable for organizations handling sensitive customer information, for e.g. a bank. 
• Hybrid cloud – It integrates both public and private cloud solutions, delivering flexibility in workload management and providing customizable control while utilizing the private cloud for sensitive data management. This solution is suitable for companies looking to scale businesses and secure data. 

Step 3: Choose a CCaaS Vendor 

Based on your business goal, shortlist the best CCaaS provider that offers functionalities to help you achieve it. Other factors include:

• Pricing model – Choose a platform that offers a pricing model that fits your budget and business requirements
• Security – Ensure the platform complies with the required data privacy and compliance regulations
• Reliability – Evaluate the uptime performance of the CCaaS solutions to understand their reliability

Request potential vendors to provide live demos or free trials to gain hands-on experience before finalizing your choice. This will help you understand the ease of use and performance capability. 

Exotel offers robust contact center functionality, high-standard security compliances, and excellent reliability. Book a demo to see how it can scale your contact center operations. 

Step 4: Deploy the CCaaS Solution

Start by setting up the initial configuration by establishing user roles, permissions, and the solution’s access structure. 

Next, integrate your existing system with the CCaaS solution to ensure seamless data flow and a unified view of customer interactions. Develop a well-defined plan to migrate historical data securely to avoid any loss. 

Conduct thorough testing of end-to-end workflow to fine-tune the performance of the solution. Ensure the solution functions seamlessly and meets your business needs. 

Step 5: Train Agents

Make your agents familiar with the new CCaaS platform and its functionalities. You can plan practical demos for each communication channel to help agents adapt to the new platform.

Step 6: Analyze & Improve

While a cloud infrastructure may not require too much maintenance, it’s important to establish a robust post-implementation aftercare. Conduct regular performance audits to identify areas for improvements to ensure flawless operations.

Implement changes based on audit findings to continuously improve efficiency. Stay updated with the latest feature updates from your provider to maintain high contact center performance. 

How to Choose the Best CCaaS Solution?

Finalizing a CCaaS solution can be difficult. Here are some questions to ask yourself when selecting a solution: 

• What type of support does the vendor provide?
• What are the communication channels it supports?
• Can it seamlessly integrate with the existing system?
• Does it offer workforce management tools?
• What data security and compliance measures are in place?
• What are the reporting & analytics capabilities?
• How customizable is the solution?
• Can it easily scale with business growth?
• How user-friendly is the platform?
• What are the pricing models?

Evaluate the potential CCaaS vendors based on these criteria to identify which best aligns with your business requirements. Consider how well the solution addresses your contact center growth plans to assess the benefit of adopting the platform.

Contact Center as a Service: Key Takeaways 

CCaaS is the perfect solution to empower your sales and support teams to deliver exceptional customer experiences across all touchpoints.

CCaaS platform provides a unified view of customer interaction, ensuring consistent and relevant communication to improve customer satisfaction.

You can choose a platform like Exotel offers advanced functionalities like auto-dialers, smart call routing, digital deflections, and advanced analytics, to optimize call center operations. Book a demo today to see how it can help your business.