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One of the most important aspects of running a business is ensuring that you take good care of your customers. However, with so many available technologies and software solutions, picking suitable options can be challenging.
An unsuitable software solution can lead to unexpected expenses, not to mention scaling issues. As such, many businesses are making the switch to a contact center as a service (CCaaS). But what is CCaaS, and how exactly does it help?
What is a contact center as a service?
CCaaS or contact center as a service is a cloud-based software solution designed to help you manage contact center services more efficiently. Companies behind CCaaS provide full support and maintenance of all contact center technology to improve customer support quality.
The idea is to create a robust contact center operated by the service provider, which drastically reduces your overall IT costs. These unique software solutions are designed to help you handle all inbound customer interactions and improve the overall customer experience. The most popular tools are cloud-based customer experience solutions that allow you to quickly address issues across every communication channel without worrying about maintenance or upgrades.
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How does a contact center work?
Many people confuse contact centers and call centers. While the two terms might sound similar, a contact center accepts inquiries from multiple channels, while a call center uses only the traditional phone system. Most contact center software is powered by cloud technology. It allows businesses to improve the quality of their customer service across all interaction channels, including email, text, phone calls, website, or social media.
Contact center infrastructure is a huge challenge to set up on your legacy systems, which is why most companies use these modern cloud-based CCaaS solutions. An online solution offers better contact center functionality and advanced features such as an automatic call distributor, a predictive dialer, skills-based routing, interactive voice response, or multiple forms of voice calls. That is only possible with a cloud-based phone system, while a traditional phone system is limited.
What is the difference between a contact center and a call center?
A call center allows you to make and receive calls, while a contact center supports omnichannel customer interaction. In other words, a cloud-based contact center solution will enable customers to reach your support team through email, live chat, phone calls, website, or social media.
While a classic call center is either an inbound call center or an outbound call center, a contact center platform includes communication through all digital channels. Most contact center cloud solutions are designed to help improve the efficiency of your agents while improving overall customer satisfaction.
It can be an inbound contact center or an outbound contact center, depending on your needs. You can also opt for an on-premises contact center if you don’t want a cloud-based solution. It works the same as an on-premises call center, with the ability to manage inquiries from digital channels.
What are the different types of contact centers?
There are a few different types designed for specific industries and uses when it comes to contact centers. Here’s a quick overview of the main types of contact centers.
1. Virtual contact center
A virtual contact center is a cloud-based solution that allows your customer support team to help customers from anywhere in the world. It will enable your agents to manage all calls and inquiries remotely.
2. On-premise contact center
An on-premise contact center is also known as a legacy contact center, and it’s entirely operated from one location. Apart from a geographical limitation, businesses have to invest a lot of time, money, and effort into running an on-premise contact center. Lastly, all contact center agents have to manage customer issues from the same office space. Therefore, this option is much more limited than a cloud-based contact center model.
A cloud contact center software is also a better solution because it can keep working even if your HQ loses power or experiences any other issue. Your agents will simply continue providing customer support remotely, and you won’t have to worry about extra expenses on hardware and other equipment.
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What is the difference between UCaaS and CCaaS?
Both UCaaS and CCaaS are technologies used to manage customer communication. While there are some differences between them, they work best when combined. For example, UCaaS focuses on internal collaboration, while CCaaS focuses more on multi-channel communication with customers. When combined, UCaaS and CCaaS offer unified communications as a service model, helping you save many overhead costs.
What are the benefits of a contact center as a service?
Cloud-based contact center systems provide a long list of benefits that will not only optimize your entire customer support operation but also help you cut down on overall costs. Most CCaaS solutions offer benefits such as:
- Workforce optimization
- Enhanced customer satisfaction
- Reduced downtime
- Rapid innovation by adding new features
- Cloud migrations
- The ability to increase employee productivity
- A safe and affordable upfront investment
- Substantial cost savings when compared to legacy systems
- A drastic reduction in the cost of ownership
- Customer experience analytics
- Better business outcomes in the long run
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Video overview of the contact center as a service
Uncover the numerous benefits of adopting CCaaS for your organization. Explore how it enables scalability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency, eliminating the need for on-premises infrastructure and providing agility in managing customer interactions. Understand how CCaaS empowers businesses to optimize resource allocation, improve agent productivity, and achieve higher customer satisfaction rates.
Topics
- Benefits of CCAS for contact center management
- Advantages of cloud-based customer experience solutions
- Importance of choosing the right CCAS supplier through a vendor-neutral technology advisor
Video summary
The video discusses the benefits of moving a contact center to the cloud through CCAS or contact center as a service. CCAS is a cloud-based customer experience solution that allows contact center leaders to utilize third-party software and hardware. With CCAS, contact center leaders can scale their business on a dime, avoid large capital investments, test new functionality and applications, recover with little to no downtime due to redundancy, and have access to user-friendly real-time functional data. Choosing the right CCAS supplier can be challenging, which is why a vendor-neutral technology advisor is recommended for unbiased best-fit recommendations.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a contact center as a service?
How does a contact center work?
A contact center allows your customer support agents to manage customer inquiries from all channels from a single platform. It is the best solution for scaling customer support, and it allows you to set up a remote customer support team if you opt for the cloud version.
What is the difference between a contact center and a call center?
A traditional call center allows your customers to call you if they need help. In contrast, a contact center allows your customer support team to manage inbound inquiries from many different customer service channels.
What are the different types of contact centers?
Contact centers are divided into two primary types — on-premises contact centers and cloud-based contact centers. The first option requires full software installation within your company’s offices, while the latter option provides more flexibility since it’s cloud-based. Moreover, cloud-based contact center software solutions are maintained, updated, and optimized by the contact center provider, while on-site solutions have higher IT costs and maintenance needs.
What is the difference between UCaaS and CCaaS?
UCaaS stands for unified communications as a service, and they include a few basic communication tools. They are mostly used to improve internal communication and streamline workflow through collaboration. CCaaS focuses on multichannel communication through a single platform. Most solutions are entirely cloud-based, reducing the costs of maintenance and improving overall customer support quality.
What are the benefits of a contact center as a service?
CCaaS provides all kinds of benefits to business owners as well as the customers. Some of the most significant benefits are reduction of ongoing costs, employee tracking and performance reporting, real-time communication with customers across multiple channels, exceptional customer experience, flexibility and scalability, increased customer satisfaction, and many others.
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Expert’s note
Expert’s noteAs a professional in customer support, I believe CCaaS is the future of exceptional customer experience. It offers scalability, cost-effectiveness, and flexibility to businesses.
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