While most organizations are familiar with the functions of a call center, they may not realize how much call or contact center technology can improve a business’s top and bottom line with improved ROI. Businesses of all sizes can provide optimal customer service, improve revenue and reduce costs using contact center as a service.
What Is CCaaS?
Contact center as a service, or CCaaS, is a call center that lives in the cloud. To access it, you simply need a computer and an internet connection. Providing quality customer service is essential for every business. Call center technology lets you meet customer service demands while reducing cost.
You’re more than likely familiar with other SaaS providers. Popular business applications include Microsoft 365, G Suite, Salesforce, and Slack. Technology advances have changed our ways of managing money, ordering food, and communicating with friends.
Cloud transformation is responsible for most of it. Businesses are rapidly moving their Information Technology operations into the cloud to take advantage of its benefits. Whether implementing a call center for the first time or migrating an on-premise center into the cloud, when you’ve chosen the right CCaaS solution, your return on investment will be immediate and ongoing.
The Benefits of CCaaS
Because it’s not on-premise, CCaaS lets you avoid costly investments such as building space to house the center, purchasing and maintaining on-premise equipment, and service interruptions for software upgrades. Your business sees a high ROI in four main areas: flexibility and scalability, reliability, future-protecting, and customer satisfaction. This essentially reduces costs and improves revenue through offering a better customer experience and improving CSAT.
CCaaS Scalability
The world’s computing resources have moved into the cloud in large part thanks to its inherent scalability. CCaaS lets you leverage this unique and popular benefit in two ways. First, CCaaS scales with your business as it grows holistically. Second, it scales as your business needs ebb and flow.
In a traditional call center, when your business needed to increase its customer service presence, you had to hire and train someone, buy more equipment, and find space to house it. When you ran out of space, you needed to rent or build a bigger building.
For businesses with seasonal changes, such as retailers, this meant people, equipment, and building space sat unused during slower times. Not so with call center technology in the cloud.
Scaling doesn’t have to be planned either. There are times when an organization needs to respond to unplanned events. CCaaS lets you leverage cloud computing infrastructure to increase or decrease your IT resources as you need them. Imagine having access to unlimited, flexible data storage capacity, processing power, and networking capabilities.
CCaaS Reliability
In-house servers require a lot of maintenance. Security threats such as malware evolve quickly. In order to keep your network safe, you must apply security patches to in-house servers quickly. In large companies with large networks, this security patch management is a full-time job. When you’ve chosen a trusted partner as your CCaaS provider, on the other hand, you don’t have to worry about it.
In addition to security threats, CCaaS helps ensure your contact center remains online when other routine maintenance upgrades are performed.
CCaaS Future-Protection
When maintaining the technology in an on-premise contact center, you’ll invariably need a server refresh. As newer technologies become available, hardware risks being antiquated fast. These server refresh cycles are getting shorter and shorter and, therefore, more expensive. Rather than invest in the planning, building, and deploying of new hardware, you simply upgrade your CCaaS package.
As customer service trends evolve (which we’ll discuss in a moment), you’ll rest easy knowing your CCaaS solution can accommodate them.
CCaaS Customer Satisfaction
While most of the obvious, immediate ROI aspects discussed are technology-based, there is one that cannot be overlooked – increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Every organization knows it’s easier and more cost-efficient to retain customers rather than acquire new ones. Brand awareness and ongoing marketing efforts are costly in planning, execution, and time. It takes money to reach people and time to convince them to buy from you. Providing excellent customer service can turn even the biggest mistake into your greatest asset. A CCaaS lets you provide customer service 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
Recent Technology Trends In CCaaS Solutions
As organizations recognize the high ROI a CCaaS solution offers, the demand for CCaaS has increased. This is good news if you’re looking to implement one today. The higher the demand, the better the solutions become, and the higher your return on investment goes.
CX Today, a leading customer experience publication, reports on five of the hottest CCaaS trends in 2022. They are summarized below:
- Cloud adoption – The ability for organizations to store all of their applications in one cloud environment.
- Improved agent training and experience – Managing the call center workforce to reduce costly turnover.
- Increased channel options – As communication channels increase, CCaaS solutions must adopt them quickly.
- VR + customer experience – Leverage virtual reality technologies to interact with customers in ways never-before-imagined.
- Personalization and data collection – Employ artificial intelligence and reporting capabilities to collect user data discreetly and securely.
Important Factors When Selecting a CCaaS Solution
To experience all the benefits and maximize your return on investment, you’ll want to choose the right CCaaS solution. In addition to choosing an omnichannel contact center solution, you’ll want to choose one that meets several other factors. These are important for businesses of all sizes and at all stages of customer service implementation:
- Omnichannel communication – You’ll want a seamless customer experience on any communication channel, easily switching between channels without losing context.
- High-quality support – You’re a customer, too, and you want your CCaaS provider to be a true partner.
- Pay-per-use pricing – To benefit from the scalability of CCaaS, you’ll want flexible pricing.
- Scalability – From seasonal ebbs and flows to emergency implementation, scalability is essential.
- Zero downtime – You should be able to expect software upgrades and maintenance that do not impact your business operations.
- Technology integrations – To ensure your IT operations stay streamlined and efficient, being able to integrate your CCaaS with other customer experience technologies is key.
- Use-case flexibility – Ideally, your team is able to build out different customer experience scenarios through an easy-to-use tool.
How Bright Pattern’s CCaaS solution Improves ROI
With a variety of CCaaS options, how will you know which one to choose? I’d like to make a recommendation. Check out Bright Pattern.
As a leading omnichannel contact center solution, Bright Pattern enables communication via self-service, web chat, SMS, text messaging, mobile apps, messenger apps, and voice and video calls. It’s a solution designed to meet all the above factors and more. These channels allow you to reduce customer effort, improve the customer experience, and improve sales and customer retention. Self-Service also allows you to reduce costs, furthering improving ROI. Businesses of all sizes see an immediate return on investment and are poised for continued growth using Bright Pattern.
Implementing an omnichannel platform for increased ROI doesn’t have to be difficult, time-consuming, or cost prohibitive. Bright Pattern per customer reviews can be deployed in half the time of other call center software platforms – in weeks. In fact, Bright Pattern’s most talked-about attributes include its value (ROI) and ease of use. Used in 26 countries and 12 languages, Bright Pattern was founded and is led by industry veterans determined to be the the easiest to use and deploy contact center solution.
At the 2022 CCW Excellence Awards held in Las Vegas, Bright Pattern was named runner-up for Cloud-Based CX Solution of the Year because of its ease of use and industry-leading ROI.
As technology and communications advance, customer service trends evolve. A cloud-based, omnichannel contact center solution will give your organization the high return on investment you want, both for today and tomorrow by improving customer satisfaction and reducing churn as well as costs.