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Contact Centre As A Service (CCaaS): What Is It And Does Your Business Need It?
Technological advancements have armed businesses with valuable tools to provide their customers with the best services possible. Ironically, technology has empowered businesses so much that the standards for customer experiences are now higher than ever. In the B2B industry, where support and the delivery of products and services have amplified implications, customer service plays an even more heightened role.
Customers pressure businesses to respond quickly and resolve issues on the first contact. Fortunately, comprehensive and scalable customer service solutions are available to help B2B businesses face the challenges. This article discusses contact centre as a service (CCaaS), what it does and whether you should consider it for your business.
What is a contact centre as a service?
A contact centre as a service (CCaaS) is a cloud-based solution for businesses’ customer service needs. As a managed service, CCaaS offers scalable pricing models. You only pay for the features you want.
These features can include integrating all your company’s communication channels, such as voice, email, social and live chat. For customers, this means businesses can respond to them on whatever communication channel they’re using.
CCaaS is also entirely hosted and maintained by the provider. Because the data centre is offsite, you eliminate the costs associated with a physical contact centre and having an in-house IT department. Additionally, the best CCaaS provides many tech features to enhance customer support.
For example, this CCaaS in the UK offers the following features:
Routing: You can design a call routing strategy that instantly connects customers with the agent most qualified to address specific concerns.
AI innovations: The CCaaS boosts agents’ performance by using real-time transcription to make the next best step while providing the necessary information to support customers.
Analytics: This gives you invaluable insight into your customer service department, and enables you to turn your KPIs into a roadmap for business growth.
As you can see, this is the next level of customer support. In the B2B industry, CCaaS gives your business the competitive advantage it needs.
Call centres and CCaaS
Traditionally, a call centre is a physical department where customer service representatives make and receive phone calls. Some sites also offer email and chat support. CCaaS is a communication platform allowing agents to interact with customers across multiple channels from any device connected to the internet.
Regarding communication channels, the main difference is that call centres focus on voice calls, while CCaaS provides omnichannel customer service. These communication channels can include the following:
Live chat
Social media
Video conferencing
Email
SMS
In recent years, however, call centres have also employed CCaaS, effectively helping them improve their capabilities. A CCaaS achieves this by consolidating a suite of tools to help call centres optimise customer interactions. Thisomnichannel capability gives agents full context about customers, regardless of how the latter contacted the business. This system provides them with all the information they need to address customer concerns.
How CCaaS can benefit your business
As a system, CCaaS can provide several benefits to businesses. Below are the primary ways this cloud-based solution can help boost your operations:
Omnichannel support
Customers want businesses to support them where they are. An excellent way to engage customers is to have a live chat feature only to ask them to submit a request on a contact page.
If you are prospecting CCaaS platforms, don’t consider the number of communication channels they can service. Instead, make sure they have integration and support for the channels your customers use the most.
Customers want businesses to be able to support them where they are. They use different platforms to reach businesses apart from phones. These include social media pages, search engines and websites. CCaaS enables you to support your customers over the phone, via email or through social media.
Central data centre
CCaaS allows you to integrate your customer relationship management tools into the system. This means you have all customer data in one data centre, allowing agents to leverage valuable information in front of them into actionable insights.
With every customer interaction stored in the system, agents have a full view of customer sentiment, account value and the nature of a request. All the readily available information allows agents to fully understand where a customer is coming from and exactly what they need.
Customisation and scalability
CCaaS allows you to customise different areas of your contact centre. Apart from designing your routing strategy, you can also tailor interactive voice response (IVR) flow and automated self-service options. These features provide seamless customer service on top of what you already have. Having the ability to customise your contact centre workflow gives this knowledge power.
Additionally, you can scale capacities and functionalities as your business requires. This gives you the agility and flexibility to serve your customers despite changing demands.
End-to-end analytics
CCaaS allows you to operationalise your data with a dashboard displaying updated customer information. You also get real-time insights into KPIs like customer satisfaction, first-call resolution rates and average handling times. This information allows you to continuously assess your quality of service and make the necessary adjustments to improve customer satisfaction progressively.
Increased productivity
Another byproduct of end-to-end analytics is a clear view of what agents and respective departments spend their time on. Managers can see how much time different tasks require and automate repetitive tasks that take up valuable resources. This allows you to optimise your workforce and implement best practices in ways you might not be able to without the insights offered by end-to-end analytics.
Does your business need CCaaS?
If your business receives a steady influx of customer requests, orders and helpdesk tickets, having a contact centre would undoubtedly help. However, consider all the ways your business could benefit more communication channels, better customer support, easily accessible data and an intuitive system.
If your business receives a steady influx of customer requests, orders and helpdesk tickets, a contact centre will undoubtedly help. It is essential to consider all the ways your business could benefit from having more communication channels and easily accessible data —all structured within an intuitive system, with scalable plans and pricing.
