7 Reasons CCaaS (Contact Center as a Service) is the Future of Support
It’s time to retire your traditional image of a contact center provider. Those endless rows of agents filling the room with ringing phones and voices are now a thing of the past in the world of business. Why?
First, the innovation through the adoption of cloud-based communications technologies means contact center agents don’t have to be on-premises working at a computer with specific programs downloaded.
Second, the cat is out of the bag on remote employment and working from home. As long as employees are connected, available, and have the tools to do the job, they don’t have to be in an office.
And finally, customers don’t always opt to call your support line. They might email you, send you a message via webchat, or get in touch through social media.
An increasingly online and digital world requires a shift in how contact centers operate. That’s why CCaaS, or contact center as a service, is the now and the future of customer support.
The 7 Benefits of Switching to CCaaS
Your contact center is the face and voice of your company. Your representatives manage your company’s first impressions and directly impact client satisfaction. Even if your company has the best quality services, if your contact center is subpar, then your customer satisfaction, referrals, and retention will suffer.
Contact centers can be challenging to manage, especially when dealing with the traditional contact center setup. With a traditional contact center, you’re dealing with on-site hardware, expensive software, unnecessary costs, and up-front, high capital investments for upgrades.
CCaaS enables your company to abandon the traditional contact center and switch to a cloud-based solution. With CCaaS, your company utilizes third-party software managed by a CCaaS provider. The CCaaS provider manages, maintains, upgrades, and troubleshoots their own solutions, so your company doesn’t have to.
The right CCaaS solution can integrate seamlessly with your CRM software, workforce management systems, quality monitoring, UCaaS, and VoIP applications. In addition, the ideal CCaaS solution can integrate with APIs for web interfaces which provides simple solutions for your developers.
LEARN MORE: Atlantech CCaaS - Powered Xima
1. Easier Access to Customer Data
A CCaaS solution provides your representatives with a centralized dashboard that makes customer data easily accessible. Traditional contact centers rely on expensive software that is often hard to learn or not similar to what agents are used to. Representatives struggle to keep track of what happened previously with a customer’s account or deal with missing account information.
Having easily accessible customer data improves your customers’ experiences as well as your representatives’ workflows. Utilizing a CCaaS solution enables your representatives to quickly notate and keep track of customer interactions and details with a comprehensive dashboard.
2. Better Experience for Customers
By implementing a multi-channel approach to your customer service, your customers receive a more personalized experience. Everyone has their preferred method of communication, including your customers. Implementing a CCaaS system enables you to offer many channels for customers to contact your representatives.
Regardless of how your customers contact your company — email, phone, text messages, website chat, instant messages, or social media chat — you can offer solutions for everyone.
3. Increased Scalability & Flexibility
Scaling a traditional contact center requires massive upgrades. From upgrading hardware, internet, and on-site real estate, to dealing with software scalability, the headaches of expanding your contact center are sometimes not even worth the DIY cost.
CCaaS eliminates the need for high capital investments. Due to the low up-front cost and the easy scalability, these solutions are more cost-effective and flexible. Many CCaaS providers offer pay-as-you-go models that are helpful for growing companies dealing with uncertainty.
4. Comprehensive Real-Time Reporting
CCaaS solutions offer real-time operational data for your analytical needs. CCaaS allows you and your team leaders to analyze performance and statistics within a user-friendly dashboard.
Implementing full-scale visibility into your business also allows you to track call data. With Xima, our choice for a CCaaS solution, you can track call data like the number of presented, answered, or missed calls and chats, how many pending callbacks are waiting, along with queue and wait time information.
Traditional contact centers have been compared to putting blindfolds on your customer service and management team. With no operational data, your representatives are flying blind, your management team is making uninformed decisions, and your customer satisfaction is suffering.
Real-time reporting makes it simple for you to run your business and make decisions based on data. Your management team can monitor skill gaps or time zone gaps and adjust accordingly. In addition to real-time reporting, the right CCaaS solution can also create custom reports easily and quickly.
5. Reduced Burden on Your IT Team
IT teams are often understaffed and overworked, and for many companies, it may be because of their contact centers. CCaaS solution relieves a significant workload off your IT team, such as the constant hardware maintenance and upgrades needed along with non-stop troubleshooting.
Outsourcing with a CCaaS provider enables your IT team to request and test new functionalities and applications easily. For example, if you wanted to implement Interactive Voice Response (IVR) into your traditional contact center, it would be expensive and time-consuming. Testing out new functionalities and apps within your CCaaS can be done within budget and quickly.
When using a CCaaS solution, you can promptly implement popular technologies that your company wants to try out, such as Workforce Management (WFM), Automatic Call Distribution (ACD), or Private Branch Exchange (PBX). All these upgrades can be done seamlessly by your CCaaS provider’s contact center specialists.
6. Reduce Risk of Compliance Issues
Maintaining compliance is crucial for contact centers. Avoiding compliance issues helps minimize avoidable risks such as violation fines and legal issues. CCaaS helps relieve the pressure on your risk management and IT department.
Company and client data are two of the most valuable assets of any business. Moving to a CCaaS model reduces the risk of redundancy and data breach issues.
For example, if there is a natural disaster in your area, your off-site CCaaS provider gives you the advantage of having very low downtime. Even if a natural disaster hits where your CCaaS hardware is located, best practices for CCaaS providers require built-in redundancy, so all your data is backed up.
7. Expand Your Workforce Talent Pool
CCaaS solutions allow you to maintain a 100 percent remote customer support workforce. You can get new representatives set up with their own dashboard and virtual operations center within a few clicks.
With a traditional call center, your talent pool is limited to the local area around you. CCaaS solutions allow you to recruit the best representatives no matter their proximity to your headquarters. With CCaaS solutions, you can easily hire and disperse your remote workforce based on their skills, channels, and time zones.
CCaaS solutions also help improve your representatives' experience with customers. By providing all the tools your representatives need, you’re more likely to retain team members.
For example, let’s say you have a customer tweet at your company about a bad experience and a representative reaches out to them. Using a CCaaS solution, your representative can link your customer’s Twitter name and interaction to their CRM profile, make notes, see the last interactions, which services they currently have with your company, and more. Your employees can handle business without unnecessary friction and ease the communication process with customers and internally with their co-workers.
Transform Your Contact Center with CCaaS from Atlantech Online
Your business deserves a cutting-edge, cost-effective, and scalable solution for your contact center. Transitioning to a cloud solution like CCaaS can deliver serious benefits and relieve unnecessary stress on your IT team, leadership, and representatives. If you’re still operating a traditional contact center, it’s time to make it easier for your team to focus on strategic initiatives and revenue growth by picking a CCaaS provider that can meet all your requirements.
