Have you ever had an important question for a company, but it was so difficult to contact them that they lost your business? Maybe they kept you on hold for an absurdly long time. Perhaps the live chat on their website was run by a bot, sending you in circles.
When communication is not streamlined, the customer experience suffers. You never want one of your customers or clients to be frustrated as a business owner. It lessens the likelihood that they will use your company in the future. Your customers should be able to have their questions and concerns, professionally and promptly addressed, which is where Contact Centers as a Service (CCaaS) comes in!
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What is Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS)?
Contact Center as a Service aka CCaaS is an on-premises call center alternative. It includes a complete communication solution centered on scalable customer experience. Businesses can launch a contact center without any hardware by using CCaaS software solutions. A CCaaS solution consolidates all customer touchpoints onto a single platform. Phone calls, live chat, emails, support tickets, and text messages are all examples of interactions. You’ve probably heard of a call center, but there’s a significant difference between call centers and contact centers.
A call center handles incoming and outgoing voice calls, whereas a contact center can handle multiple channels, including digital ones. A fully functional contact center provides customers with text and visual communications in addition to phone calls. A contact center frequently employs agents who can handle a variety of voice and digital communications. You’ve probably heard of “Unified Communications as a Service” (UCaaS). While UCaaS and CCaaS are synonymous, UCaaS typically refers to internal communication within your organization, whereas CCaaS focuses on external communication with your customers.
CCaaS capitalizes on the fact that voice and data communications can be efficiently routed to any agent with access to a broadband or IP connection. This eliminates the need for a centralized, on-premises call center because a widely distributed agent pool across multiple locations can be used. Cloud technology is used in contact centers, allowing agents to be mobile. The most important thing to remember as we discuss this topic is that CCaaS improves the customer experience, which is critical for repeat business and long-term success for your business.
Let’s go over some CCaaS statistics.
CCaaS technology opens up new possibilities for launching larger inbound and outbound communications practices, resulting in increased operational efficiencies and improved customer experiences. It enables you to reach customers through their preferred channels, such as social media, text messaging, or video conferencing. Read through the critical contact center as a service statistics below to learn how CCaaS adoption leads to better results.
1. 62% of modern businesses plan to enforce a CCaaS
Businesses confirmed to Cisco that they planned to implement cloud contact solutions within the next 18 months, in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic. With the increasing demand for more agile work-from-home work profiles, cloud-based systems enable employees to receive customer inquiries and make outbound calls from any part of the world.
A new emphasis on customer experience is also driving the increased emphasis on contact centers as a service. Customer retention has become a major priority for companies as they face new levels of competition online. As a result, the broadening touchpoints provided by CCaaS are becoming more important, and the customer experience (CX) manager has a greater say in the solutions that are adopted.
2. CCaaS Provides Businesses with Greater Scalability and Financial Flexibility
Enhanced customer experience is not the only reason businesses are moving to CCaaS. In fact, 90% of contact centers that chose to migrate to the cloud did so because cloud-based contact centers allow for greater financial flexibility.
Cloud services enable easy scaling up and down as needed. When campaigns are live, for example, simply contacting the CCaaS provider and upgrading to a more feature-rich plan tier is very simple. When a campaign is over, you can make an identical call to downgrade to a lower tier with fewer CCaaS features.
These strategies are also very easy to implement. For example, if you already have a RingCentral account, upgrade to RingCentral Contact Center when you need to analyze critical call center KPIs (key performance indicators). This technology is quickly becoming a focus because CCaaS solutions bring ease and efficiency to businesses, and these businesses prioritize the customer experience.
Even though investing in on-premise contact center technology can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, traditional on-premise contact centers prefer to use cloud technologies. Cloud solutions host technology at the provider level and newer features can be deployed as needed at a low monthly cost.
CCaaS is also simple to set up. Instead of call center hardware, most providers require only a computer with a headset, a smartphone, or an IP desk phone.
3. CCaaS Creates Omnichannel Customer Experiences
In response to the growing demand for multi- and omnichannel touchpoints, contact centers are shifting to cloud-based models. These frequently employ intelligent omnichannel routing, which ensures that each customer is connected to the agent best suited to their communication requirements.
CCaaS technology is constantly evolving, and the majority of providers offer contact options via email, chat, SMS, voice, social media, and video. These include communication service providers such as the 808 Contact Center, Freshdesk Contact Center, RingCentral Contact Center, and Nextiva.
While having multiple contact channels is advised, an omnichannel experience is clearly preferred as more customer needs are met. Customers are not continuously passed between agents in this manner, which dilutes and degrades the customer experience. Customers are also prevented from repeating information across channels, allowing centers to meet customer needs more efficiently.
4. CCaaS solution can resolve issues more quickly and easily.
Customer service efficiency is increasing as businesses begin to embrace cloud-based contact. According to Esteban Kolsky, a customer service expert, using CCaaS solutions can reduce churn by up to 67%. These types of solutions aid in the reduction of multiple customer issue resolutions to a single interaction.
The primary technology enabling this single-interaction resolution is real-time data provided by CRM (customer relationship management) solutions.
You could potentially save money on poor customer service experiences if you provide an omnichannel experience. Money is lost when customers are dissatisfied. In fact, businesses lose approximately $75 billion when customer service is inadequate and customers are not met on the appropriate platform.
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5. Customers continue to contact businesses by phone (despite omnichannel opportunities)
While omnichannel is important, many customers prefer to contact their favorite companies by phone. According to Claes Fornell International (CFI) Group research, 70% still prefer this method of contacting customer support. It’s important to remember that voice calling is still supported in modern contact centers, and many voice over internet protocol (VoIP) providers have tiers and entire plans dedicated to CCaaS.
6. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is enhancing customer experiences in CCaaS environments.
Contact centers can more easily adopt newer technologies to improve business processes with a cloud-based architecture. According to Business 2 Community research, artificial intelligence technology is quickly becoming one of the most process-enhancing features of CCaaS. According to Aberdeen research, artificial intelligence increases yearly revenue by up to 2.4 times more than centers that do not use AI.
AI software automates the process, reducing information overload on agents and, in some cases, reducing interactions to a single instance. This type of solution provides an effective “partner” for agents interacting with customers, assisting and guiding them in real-time decision-making.
It is critical to recognize the importance of personalization during CCaaS interactions. Showing your clients that you are paying attention to their specific needs is extremely valuable during both business-to-customer and business-to-business interactions. AI assists in providing recommendations for content and products that are tailored to your clients’ needs and will be useful to them. As a result, customer satisfaction improves.
7. Self-service CCaaS features increase customer convenience
CCaaS solutions, like most VoIP systems, offer some self-service features via interactive voice response (IVR) software. Customers benefit from IVR systems because they help to automate basic business processes.
Many customers, for example, simply want to call your company and pay their bills. This functionality is provided by an IVR system without the use of an agent. When finished, it saves card information, requests PINs and usernames/passwords, and updates the customer’s profile.
Furthermore, CCaaS IVR systems allow customers to schedule callbacks or view transaction details such as account balances or payment dates. This simplifies the customer service process and ensures that your agents only receive inbound calls that require more in-depth human-based resolution.
8. CCaaS improves efficiency and saves money for businesses
Apart from improving the customer experience, CCaaS also provides important business benefits such as maximizing financial resources. Businesses, for example, can save significantly by allowing many agents to work from home. According to Frost and Sullivan’s research, contact center employees who work from home save their employers up to $25,000 per year.
Aside from the financial benefits, CCaaS increases work time. According to Business News Daily, work-from-home employees work up to 1.4 days more per month than office-based contact center agents.
VOO, a leading Belgian telecommunications company, discovered that by moving to the cloud, absenteeism dropped from 62% to around 5%. Any professional contact center understands that absenteeism frequently results in lower service quality. In fact, it is frequently the source of long hold times and decreased productivity. VOO also noticed that after switching to a CCaaS solution, the average number of calls per day increased from 1,300 to 1,800.
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Bottom Line
As part of a modern business phone system, CCaaS technology assists businesses in managing their customers and colleagues. And, according to the CCaaS statistics presented above, it is not nearly as expensive as businesses might expect. It offers better customer service at a very low cost, starting at around $30 per user, per month. The number of CCaaS solutions is also steadily increasing, allowing businesses to choose the one that best meets their needs.
[To share your insights, please write to us at sghosh@martechseries.com]