CCaaS: The Future of Contact Centers – Growth, Benefits, Challenges, and Good Practices

Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) refers to the provision of contact center services through a cloud-based platform. This market is seeing massive growth worldwide.

The CCaaS market was valued at US $4.7 Billion in 2022. This market is estimated to reach US $23.6 Billion in 2032 at the highest CAGR of 18% between 2022 and 2032, according to market.us

While these numbers are specific to the North American market, the trends remain the same worldwide, especially in India.

What Is Driving This Growth?

• Growing adoption of omnichannel communication. Customers use multiple channels to interact with businesses – voice, SMS, WhatsApp, Email, chat, mobile apps, and social media, making companies offer seamless experiences across all channels.

• The rising trend of remote work – COVID-19 necessitated employees to work from home, which has now become the norm. CCaaS makes it easier for people to work from anywhere. You only need a browser and active Internet connectivity to offer better customer experiences.

• The growing number of small and medium-sized enterprises across all sectors, which are customer-centric. CCaaS allows them to have access to features and capabilities that were previously accessible only to large enterprises.

• The growth of the BPO sector

• The need for scalability and flexibility – organizations want to scale up and down their infrastructure per their business needs. With CCaaS, you can scale up and down on a pay-per-use model at the click of a button.

• The need for cost-effectiveness – you don’t have to pay upfront for the infrastructure, servers, and storage. You subscribe to the service on a per-minute basis. We go a bit further; in our case, we don’t ask for contracts or minimum commitments. It is absolutely on a per-minute basis.

CCaaS Challenges

There are pros and cons to every solution. However, the pros should outweigh the cons. By being a CCaaS provider for long, we have found ways to address every challenge it throws up.

Let us look at the challenges and how they can be addressed.

Complexity in Customization

Most CCaaS providers ask you to live with the one-size-fits-all approach. However, every contact center will have its workflow, and they would want customizations. Those who agree to do the customizations charge a bomb, which no longer makes it cost-effective. Besides, it takes a long time to get it up and functional.

Our platform is architected in such a way that most needs are configurable, and the little customizations we do, we do them free of charge before onboarding the customers.

Training Users

It takes a long time to train agents to ensure the adoption of the CCaaS platform. Organizations must invest in comprehensive training programs to help users leverage the platform’s full potential.

With years of experience helping more than 1500 customers worldwide, we have created a training program that agents can go through in hours, not days or weeks. Besides, our platform is so intuitive that agents get comfortable in no time.

Regulatory Compliance

Organizations must comply with industry-specific regulations, which can challenge CCaaS providers.

We comply with SOC, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, TCPA, FDCPA, Reg-F, Fedramp, ISAE 3402 Type II specifications, STIR/SHAKEN processes, DoT, and TRAI regulations in India. This ensures adherence to applicable regulations and mitigating risks, improving customer trust and satisfaction.

Security Concerns

Organizations typically have data security and privacy concerns in the cloud. How do you address them?

Cloud providers typically have better security mechanisms compared to what you may have in-house. Usually, cloud providers have full-time staff monitoring their security operations center round-the-clock against attacks and vulnerabilities.

Besides, cloud providers would ensure data availability, offer redundancy and failover, support virtualization, offer physical security, apply security patches and address operating system vulnerabilities, handle user segmentation, and encryption support.

Integration Challenges

Organizations use different systems to manage the customer journey. They would have separate billing systems, CRM, helpdesk, etc. How do you integrate the CCaaS platform with all of this to provide exceptional customer experiences?

We offer API integrations and already have pre-built integrations with industry-leading CRMs and helpdesk platforms.

Connectivity and Reliability

CCaaS heavily relies on a stable and reliable Internet connection. When your remote workers have inadequate Internet infrastructure, it can affect the performance of your contact center and, eventually, the customer experience function.

We circumvented the low-bandwidth issues using the connected method for telephony with regular PSTN connectivity. They connect to our platform using PSTN connectivity, and our platform carries the voice to the desired destination.

Aren’t There Too Many Options?

Too many people claim to be CCaaS providers, making it confusing for you to choose the appropriate platform.

Here is the checklist.

1. Do they package everything together – dialers, voice, customizations, and integrations as a part of their offering?
2. Are they really pay-as-you-go? Do you have to sign any contracts or sign up for minimum commitments?
3. Do they charge for the first-time customization? Some of them offer it free before onboarding you.
4. Figure out what is configurable and what needs to be customized. What would be the customization charges?
5. Do they help in integrating the contact center platform with other best-of-breed applications? Does it support API-based integrations?
6. Do they already have existing integrations with industry-leading CRMs like Zoho, Salesforce, Zendesk, ServiceNow, Freshdesk, and Leadsquared?
7. Do they have analytics and intelligence as a part of their offerings? Does it provide you insights from the data?
8. What are the support SLAs the vendor provides? Are they in hours or days, or weeks?
9. How easy is it to generate reports? Would it be done in minutes or hours?
10. Do they support work-from-home options? What if the bandwidth is low? What if the agents don’t have access to enterprise-grade systems?
11. How do you handle data from multiple sources? Do they provide something to slice and dice the data – sort, filter, parse, enrich, review, and prioritize?
12. Do they provide a single view of the customers across all channels?
13. Does it support blended dialing? – both outbound and inbound
14. What are the training requirements for me to use the platform? Would it take me hours or weeks?
15. Do they onboard you within 24 hours, or does it take six to eight weeks?

Once you are clear about all these, you can choose the appropriate cloud contact center for your needs.

CCaaS is the way to go forward, as every organization has either moved its contact center to the cloud or is moving it to the cloud.

Cloud offers unparalleled benefits – the most important of them being the simplicity and the ease with which it can be implemented and operated, making it easy for organizations to put their customers at the center of everything they do.