How Do You Choose the Best CCaaS Provider?

Expert Market Research (EMR) has estimated the market size of CCaaS to be worth US $4.9 billion in 2022. It is forecasted to grow at a CAGR of 16.60%, and the predicted market size by 2028 is US $12.32 billion.

We look at almost three times the growth in the next six years.

Let us first understand what CCaaS is before we discuss its growth and the impact that it is going to have on the customers.

What Is CCaaS?

For long, organizations had only dialers and telephony to reach out to prospects and receive customer calls. Then came the contact centers, where other channels got added to the mix. This was all available as an on-premise setup and came at a high cost. So, contact centers were mainly restricted to large organizations.

With CCaaS, the contact center platform is hosted on the cloud, and organizations can subscribe to it as a service – based on the number of seats or the number of minutes they consume. CCaaS has made delivering excellent customer experience a level playing field where organizations of any size can subscribe to it.

CCaaS did not have a considerable uptake initially, with verticals like BFSI and Healthcare preferring to keep their platforms in-house, as their security and privacy policies did not allow the hosting of any data on the cloud. This changed with the pandemic’s onset; both sectors used

CCaaS extensively during the lockdowns.

The growth in BFSI and the healthcare sector has resulted in the overall growth of CCaaS.

CCaaS has become mainstream, and there are multiple providers of CCaaS solutions. How do you go about choosing what is right for you?

How to Choose the Best CCaaS Provider?

Here are the 4 simple steps to choose the best CCaaS provider.

1. See If They Have the Necessary Features

The must-haves are dialer, telephony, automatic call distribution, IVR, call recording, screen recording, and reporting & analytics.

Besides, you have to see the other channels the platform offers you. For instance, your customer demography may choose to reach you across various channels – website, email, voice, SMS, WhatsApp, chat, mobile apps, and social. See if your platform offers what you need and do they integrate all the channels to give you a single view of your customers – omnichannel communication.

Now, we move on to advanced features like workforce management, workforce optimization, list management services, voice analytics, conversational AI, and intelligence.

The first step is to determine what you need as an organization and see if the provider offers you those as a part of their offering. Also, check if they allow you to play with their platform for a few weeks before you subscribe.

2. What Level of Professional Service Does the Provider Offer?

• Does the provider agree to customize their offerings for your needs?
• Do they have easy provisions to configure their platform for your needs?
• What level of customization are they willing to do?
• What timeframe are you looking at before they roll out the solution with customizations?
• What is the cost of customizations?

You should be mindful of all this before deciding on a provider.

Besides, is the provider’s platform easy to integrate with your best-of-breed IT solutions like CRM, Helpdesk, and ERP?

Are they willing to help you with those?

3. Post-Sales Support and Reliability 

• What uptime do they guarantee for the platform?
• What are the support SLAs for L1, L2, and L3 issues?
• Are they available 24×7?
• How do they manage the updates and patches?
• How often do they carry out maintenance of the infrastructure? How do they plan it?
• Do they promise redundancy, failover, and availability?
• What about the security of the infrastructure?
• Do they share with you a vulnerability and penetration report of their platform?

4. What About the Pricing?

• Do they charge you based on the number of seats?
• Do they charge based on the number of minutes you consume?
• Do they ask for any minimum guarantees?
• Do they ask for any contractual agreements?
• What happens to your billing when you scale down your needs?

Once you have answers to these, you should be able to decide on the best CCaaS that would suit your organizational needs.

CCaaS is fuelling technological advancements in the contact center space. Combined with AI, ML, and IoT, CCaaS will help you offer exemplary experiences to your customers.