Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) platforms unify contact center communications in the cloud. While many organizations may prefer on-premise solutions due to security, existing investments, or other concerns, the advantages of CCaaS are too great to ignore, especially when factored into the changing consumer landscape and prevalence of remote work. Moving into 2022 and beyond, CCaaS capabilities may become necessities for many businesses. Here are the top seven CCaaS benefits that you should consider.
Omnichannel Communication Choices
When a customer gets to choose how they communicate with a business, it gets the interaction off on the right foot. Omnichannel communication enables contact center agent dialogue via phone calls, text messages, email, SMS and even social media. The depth of these interactions can even transcend intentional customer outreach.
Some CCaaS APIs can monitor social media channels and flag negative feedback as it’s posted, enabling agents to respond in real-time. This can not only help rescue a relationship with a single dissatisfied customer, it can also provide valuable reputation management. As 91% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations, mitigating1 negative social media posts can be vital for new customer acquisition.
Intelligent Call Routing
As useful as omnichannel communication can be, calls to contact center agents will always be essential, especially for more complex customer issues and inquiries. Intelligent call routing leverages customer data—like demographics, purchase history, support history, and location—against your contact center agent roster—area of specialty, experience, corresponding demographics, and more—to automatically make the best customer service match.
We all know the frustration of waiting on hold and explaining our problem only to be transferred to another agent. But did you know that 60% of consumers find waiting on hold to be the most frustrating aspect of customer service, and 33% find repeating themselves to multiple representatives to be even more frustrating?2
Most obviously, intelligent call routing can alleviate these customer frustrations and improve the service experience. But intelligent call routing can also improve the efficiency and happiness of your call center agents. By placing your agents on calls with the greatest chance of expedient resolutions, their jobs become easier and more pleasant.
End-to-End Business Analytics
The same depth of data that powers intelligent call routing also offers detailed analytics on customers and contact center agents. From the standpoint of the consumer, you can gain insights into customer satisfaction, buying trends, and more. From the standpoint of employees, every customer interaction can be analyzed to evaluate performance and improve your workforce.
Ease of Supervision
As the end-to-end analytics capabilities suggests, all contact center operations are brought into a single pane of glass, right down to individual agents. This provides supervisors with an unparalleled level of visibility and control, even for large teams working in different contact centers, remotely, or in hybrid environments. Further, many CCaaS platforms are designed for integration with CRMs, which increases the potential managerial tools for supervisors.
Cost Effectiveness
CCaaS platforms are generally more cost-effective than on-premise solutions from beginning to end. First, they do not require a significant upfront investment in technology that requires dedicated employees to maintain and will depreciate both in value and respective utility over time. CCaaS licenses are generally priced at a flat rate per employee. Secondly, CCaaS updates are seamless and only cause downtime on the rarest of occasions. Thirdly, CCaaS platforms are scalable by nature. If there is a cause to temporarily ramp up contact center agents, they can easily be added to your CCaaS plan and then removed at will.
Remote Work
The pandemic supercharged the prevalence of remote work. As of June of 2021, 35% of employees reported working remotely and 30% reported working in hybrid environments.3 As many businesses began to encourage or even mandate returning to the office, the Omicron variant caused many to reverse course. Going forward, two things are certain—remote work will be much more common than it was before COVID-19 and offering remote or hybrid work roles will be useful for attracting quality employees.
This is another major strength of CCaaS platforms. Remote contact center employees are able to access the same tools that onsite employees use. Considering the end-to-end analytics and single pane of glass performance visibility for supervisors, remote contact center agents can be just as effective and well-supervised as their onsite counterparts.
Increased Customer Satisfaction
Customer satisfaction is what contact centers are designed to provide. It’s easy to see why omnichannel communication capabilities and intelligent call routing can enhance the customer experience. But the importance of customer service to the consumer cannot be overstated. 58% of consumers will switch companies because of poor customer service, and nearly 80% will “forgive a bad experience” if they feel the customer service team is “very good.”4 CCaaS platforms not only provide the ability for choice in communication and efficiency in agent routing, they enable businesses to gain a deeper understanding of what their customers really want.
IPC Tech and CCaaS
Many people view IPC as a provider of communications technology, but what we really do is open doors of communication between businesses and their customers. The technology is just how we accomplish that mission. To that end, we work with all the leading providers of CCaaS solutions, including InContact, RingCentral, Talkdesk, Five9, and more.
That’s why it’s key for businesses who want to adopt a CCaaS platform to work with an expert like IPC Tech. There are many different providers with overlapping and contrasting features and benefits. Understanding each one enables us to make the best match with a business and its customers.
1 https://www.brightlocal.com/research/local-consumer-review-survey/
2 https://blog.hubspot.com/service/customer-service-stats
3 https://www.quantumworkplace.com/future-of-work/remote-work-statistics
4 https://blog.hubspot.com/service/customer-service-stats
Do you want your contact center to work better for your customers and your business?
Contact IPC Tech today about your optimal CCaaS solution.