As consumer expectations rise and businesses strive for every competitive advantage, fully shifting contact centers to the cloud is becoming an ever more pressing need. Companies should accelerate their adoption of Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solutions in order to gain that crucial edge on the competition.

Defining CCaaS

Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) is a software deployment approach that allows businesses to buy only the technology they need and typically gets managed by a vendor to save money on IT, integration, and support. In contact centers, CCaaS solutions are cloud-based customer experience (CX) solutions. However, in some cases, an on-premise CCaaS software solution is preferable.

Contact Center vs. Call Center

Both contact centers and call centers are customer service centers, and these terms frequently get interchanged. The main distinction between the two is that call centers exclusively handle inbound or outbound calls. In contrast, contact centers provide omnichannel customer service via email, chat, Voice over IP (VoIP), and website assistance.

Notably, the modular infrastructure of the cloud based contact center also allows managers to maximize the effectiveness of their teams while also benefiting from improved security, more protected data, improved customer interactions, and increased flexibility.

The Benefits of CCaaS

Businesses that choose a CCaaS solution can benefit from a wide range of cost, convenience, efficiency, ease of usage, and customer satisfaction benefits.

With that, the following are three advantages that every CCaaS customer can anticipate by implementing contact center technology:

Greater Customer Experience

Although contact centers exist to serve customers, traditional solutions have frequently failed to deliver on their promises.

Customer-centric CCaaS solutions get built to fit the way people work and interact today, and they continue to improve. In addition, CCaaS systems link to email, social media, mobile, and real-time chat into a unified platform that supports information tracking across all channels, resulting in a superior customer support experience.

High Degrees of Scalability, Reliability, and Availability

One of the most common advantages of a cloud contact center solution is that it allows businesses to quickly scale to meet changing business and customer demands, including the option to add or remove agents.

Moreover, CCaaS systems provide the highest levels of availability, reliability, and disaster recovery, with most providers guaranteeing uptime of up to 99.99% by storing infrastructure in geographically redundant data centers. These data centers also get staffed around the clock — 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Substantial Cost Savings

When you move to a cloud-based, omnichannel CCaaS solution effectively matches the significant cost savings offered by most “as a service” cloud migrations. These are some of them:

• Diminished downtime;
• Low power costs;
• Optimal hardware utilization;
• No upfront investments;
• Reduced IT staffing; and
• Simplified billing.

Top CCaaS Offerings

While there are many big name organizations that have CCaaS listed as a solution in their suite of services, we’re going to focus on those companies that specialize in providing contact center deployments across business verticals. These companies have the expertise, flexibility, and innovative thought to deliver custom made solutions regardless of your organizations needs.

8x8

8x8’s eXperience Communications Platform provides call center software, business phone, video meetings, team chat, and API’s and embeddable apps to their customers. 8x8 cloud solutions help businesses transform their customer and employee experience. With one system of engagement for voice, video, collaboration and contact center and one system of intelligence on one technology platform, businesses can now communicate faster and smarter to exceed the speed of customer expectations.

RingCentral

With their flexible, cost-effective cloud communications and collaboration solutions, RingCentral creates the ideal workplace where business can be done more efficiently and effectively. From an all-in-one cloud phone system with team messaging, video conferencing, and performance management, to a complete contact center, RingCentral builds solutions for every business, no matter how big or small.

Talkdesk

Talkdesk is an enterprise cloud contact center solution provider that offers an intuitive and adaptable platform. They strive to empower companies to continuously improve customer experience with solutions that are easy to set up, use, and adapt as business needs change. A leader in Gartner’s Contact Center as a Service Magic Quadrant, Talkdesk offers ongoing innovation, superior call quality, and instant integration to the most popular business applications.

NICE inContact

NICE inContact is a cloud contact center software leader with one of the industry’s top cloud customer experience platform. NICE inContact CXone™ combines best-in-class Omnichannel Routing, Analytics, Workforce Optimization, Automation and Artificial Intelligence on an Open Cloud Foundation. Their solution provides organizations with the analytics and tools necessary to provide exceptional customer experiences by acting smarter and responding faster to consumer expectations.