Cloud-based technology is bringing big changes to every business and contact centers are no exception. Today, Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) is displacing old technology like on-premise ACD's.
The question is does contact center technology actually deliver better business results?
Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) is a call center software, typically deployed in the cloud. CCaaS provides the core communications components for a contact center with things like skills-based routing, IVR, and outbound capabilities.
Why is CCaaS displacing old technology? The answer comes down to four critical aspects of contact center management. CCaaS improves every critical contact center metric. It reduces costs, increases flexibility and speed, easily integrates into your organization, and improves on reliability.
CCaaS is an OpEx model, so it is an operational expense rather than a capital expense. Generally, there are no upgrade fees, so you buy the product once and as it evolves you don't have to pay for add-ons and upgrades. The hardware requirements are minimal; you're dealing with a computer that's connected to the internet.
You only pay for what you use. CCaaS is flexible and allows you to scale your number of users up or down according to your needs. You are no more paying for excess capacity that goes unused.
As we touched on earlier, CCaaS allows you to scale up and down the number of active users; you're paying only for those that are using the technology. You don't have to pay for the high water mark as you would in older legacy models. You gain new features without incurring any downtime or additional costs.
Minimal hardware requirements mean that you can deploy CCaaS anywhere that has an internet connection. You can have CCaaS implemented in days or weeks as opposed to months or years to implement legacy systems.
API friendly solutions allow you to plug and play with minimal effort and reduced cost. Even more important, it will enable you to retain the components of your technology stack that you love and replace the ones that you don't like.
Administration and reporting is simplified in the CCaaS model. Generally, you should be able to administer users and manage profile requirements all in one place and have them applied throughout your platform. The same goes for reporting. With cloud technology, aggregating data into a single reporting location is very easy.
CCaaS comes with so many redundancies and routes for the technology to be backed up and supported that you should come to expect 100% uptime.
Any vendor that doesn't give you a service level agreement of 100% or close to 100% uptime is missing the mark. This level of uptime is do-able, and the technology supports it.
Even so, you can still monitor the system 24/7 from anywhere.