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This blog was contributed by TBI Tech Guru, John Romeo. An accomplished Solution Architect and US Patent holder, John brings over 24 years of product management, technical sales and design experience, working with Fortune 100 companies to provide Unified Communications and Contact Center solutions for business continuity and improve business processes. You can reach John at jromeo@tbicom.com or connect on LinkedIn.

Survey says 95% of IT leaders see a direct connection between communications technology and business profitability. 

Although unified communications (UC) systems and contact center solutions have previously been thought of as separate entities, cloud technology has increasingly facilitated collaboration between the two. Cloud has removed restrictions of on-prem hardware which enables the contact center solution's remarkable versatility and fluidity - both crucial strengths required to provide the increasingly personalized and convenient services demanded by customers in the digital age.   

Consumers expect a lot. How a service representative or technical support specialist interacts, how quick they are to interact and how a problem or question is resolved can make or break sales. In this day in age, the customer experience is paramount to any company’s business.  

Contact Center as a Service has transitioned from data integration to intelligence. We’ve come to expect CCaaS solutions to include social integration, machine learning, chat bots, and powerful analytics native within the platform or as robust add-ons. What was considered avant garde, is now expected of contact centers – they have been transformed into holistic customer intelligence hubs. 

What is CCaaS?

 CCaaS—contact center as a service—is a cloud-based customer experience solution allowing business of all sizes to utilize communications tools that enable them to provide superior and streamlined omnichannel communication to their customers; physical call center not required. 

Benefits of CCaaS
According to Contact Center 2.0, The Rise of Collaborative Contact Centers by Altimeter, top reasons for moving to the cloud include: increased reliability/uptime, ability to better meet the needs of today’s customer, better reporting and analytics, ability to scale up or down, improved security and to reduce reliance of internal IT. 

Cloud Contact Center solutions provide the highest levels of availability, reliability and disaster recovery. Most providers promise uptime as high as 99.99% by leveraging geographically redundant data centers, staffed 24/7/365.  

• Agents can be remote; not tied to a call center 
• Availability to the consumer (across all touchpoints)
• Integrations and APIs to existing apps and software
•  Analytics  
• Customer Experience  
• Hold times  
• Time to resolution 
• One call resolution 
• Internal (agent/department) 
• Call abandonment rate 
• Volume 
• Identify peak times/slow times 
• Call-back solutions 
• Flexibility to add/remove agents quickly (i.e. peak seasons vs. slow seasons) 
• Monitor/adjust queues on the fly 
• Review call scripts 
• Record/review calls for quality and/or training purposes 
• Reduce IT headcount (lower maintenance cost) 
• Seamless interdepartmental access 
• Business continuity & disaster recovery 
• Improved security & compliance {In fact, 70% of cloud contact center users cite security and compliance as a reason to invest in cloud technology (Aberdeen)} 
• HIPPA, GDPR, PCI-DS 
• The software as a service nature means call center software is future-proofed from costly upgrades/updates 

Is CCaaS Right for My Organization?

CCaaS solutions are gradually being recognized as valuable tools to help modern businesses provide exceptional customer service, as evidenced by the CCaaS market’s expected rise to an estimated nearly $16 billion by 2021. Any organization that prioritizes customer experience should take advantage of CCaaS functionality to improve customer engagement and satisfaction. 

CCaaS functionality, like intelligent routing and CRM sync, make it so customers can transition between departments without changing their mode of contact or initiating interactions more than once, and various employees are able access any relevant data before being connected with that customer. Customers themselves have grown to expect brand experiences that are both effortless as well as seamless—no matter the location, time or touchpoint.  

Although 80% of organizations feel their customer service is great, in reality, 84% of customers are dissatisfied with their contact center experiences, so there is plenty of room for improvement across a broad range of verticals and business types. 

Questions to Consider When Researching Unified Communications Solutions

Sales Departments 

• Do you track things like how many times you call a prospect before they become a customer? Or how many times a customer has to call before an issue is resolved?
• Is your contact center tied to revenue?  

 Services Departments  

• Do you have the ability to see your call abandon rate? (For example, how many callers hang up before they talk to someone, and how long do they wait before they hang up?) 
• How much visibility do you have into your contact center’s performance? 
• Do you know how many calls you receive a day and more importantly, do you know what each call is about? 
• What happens when your customers call your main number? What do you want to have happen when they call that main number? 
• How do your current customers interact with your company? (For example, phone, chat, email or SMS) 

C-Suite  

• Do you have all the features that you want in your current call center?
•  Do you have the need for remote users? 
• Do you have times when the weather is bad and not everyone can get to the office? 
• Do you think you would have happier employees if they could work from home some days? 
• Do you have staffing problems today? 

Contact Center Manager  

• What are the various platforms consumers are reaching out to the company?
•  How do you address staffing levels today? 
• What are your KPIs? 
• Do you leverage post-call surveys? 
• Do you have skilled-based routing today? 
• How do you measure customer satisfaction? 
• What is your wish list of features you would like to have in your Call center? 
• What do you consider the key criteria for a successful call center? 

IT  

• What are your challenges is managing your current call center?
•  How much time is dedicated to managing your call center? 
• Can you manage your call center remotely? 
• Do you want embed ACD/telephony into your CRM system for click-to-call or screen pops? 
• Do you want to have a knowledge base for your agents? 

What to Look for in a CCaaS provider

• According to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, functions and abilities that organizations should consider when reviewing contact center requirements include:
•  Automatic call distribution (ACD) and interactive voice response (IVR) 
• True omnichannel capabilities—universal routing and queuing of voice and internet channels — such as email, web chat, SMS, social media and video 
• Chatbot capability — to support self-service and assisted-service interactions and transactions 
• Proactive contact — including outbound dialing and SMS, as well as push text and email notifications 
• Inbound, outbound, & blended calling abilities—easily added or removed in the future, based on company needs 
• Open API—allows integrations with any existing or future software  
• Access to customer data — by connecting to existing web-based applications or CRM solutions via a purpose-built adapter or web technology toolkit 
• Support of virtual operations, remote agents and subject matter experts that reside outside the traditional contact center operation 
• Customer relationship tracking, management applications and operational support applications — including reporting, analytics, sentiment analysis, self-service  

Some of these functionalities are provided solely by CCaaS providers while others are utilized in partnership with specialist providers. 

Read more about CCaaS here.