When it comes to buying a new contact centre – or new contact centre software – in 2019, it’s easy to talk about Contact Centre as-a-Service (CCaaS). Synonymous with CCaaS is omni-channel, chatbots, artificial intelligence, advanced reporting and analytics. The list goes on.
It seems easy to suggest that CCaaS is the only option viable today. A little like Cisco’s mantra of video-first, the Unified Comms and contact centre industries – in fact, technology in general, is going cloud-first.
Just like in your consumer life where Netflix, Spotify and Amazon offer subscription services via their cloud platform, your communications and contact management can be consumed on a monthly basis, scaling up and down as you wish.
Pros and cons of CCaaS
The obvious pros of contact centre revolve around functionality. It is simpler and quicker to turn on functionality you didn’t have yesterday. It is also just as easy to turn it off if you are no longer using it.
Say you decide on day one that you need to implement a social media channel into your contact centre agents. After three months, your Twitter following hasn’t grown and your Facebook page is only liked by your employees because you asked them to. This is the point where you can review whether you are getting value from your social media channels.
Some CCaaS providers wrap social media into their omni-channel license. Others include it as a separate bolt-on, realising that it may not be required every time. This applies to almost every channel in the contact centre. Not every business uses email. Not every business needs web chat embedded on their website.
When the functionality is baked into an omni-channel license, you may be overpaying for functionality that you may not use. The vast functionality available with CCaaS solution can be both a pro and a con.
Optichannel – more than CCaaS
To find a way around overproviding functionality to businesses, I reached out to Mike Wheadon, Business Development Director at Formation Tech, whose view was that there was more to come and CCaaS on its on is not the holy grail.
“CCaaS can be the holy grail for contact centres. But only if you streamline the channels to fit the customer interaction at hand. Simply adding lots of channels doesn’t automatically mean you’ll enhance the customer experience”
I’d previously discussed the idea of the optichannel contact centre with Mike. By optimising an omni-channel CCaaS play, businesses start delivering an exceptional customer experience by interacting where their customers are already trying to interact.
For example, if a customer visits your website but cannot find your phone number, proactive web chat could be one option. By popping up a web chat when a customer is trying to contact you, they save time lost searching for you. In the same vein, this could also be remedied by making your phone number more visible. No matter how advanced technology becomes, people still like to talk on the phone. The moral of the story here is “go where your customers are”. And that’s optichannel.
Have CCaaS your way
Jeremy Payne, VP of Marketing at Enghouse Interactive, provided me with an interesting take on CCaaS being the holy grail for contact centres.
“Technology and software often go through what Gartner call a hype curve and for most markets they cover they publish a Hype Curve as the market begins to mature"
"When we consider the concept of a “cloud” contact centre, it’s probably fair to say this is a market that’s had its share of hype. After all you could go way back to Y2K to find what were then called ASPs or application service providers offering solutions that today would be called Cloud.
