What is CCaaS?

Ready to elevate your customer experience by delivering customer care with CCaaS? Find out what it is and how it works in this guide.

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For businesses of all kinds, it can sometimes feel as though you’re always chasing the next best technology to stay ahead of the curve and keep customers satisfied. Researching and testing out different contact centre technologies can take up a large amount of time and resources, which can lead to spending more money rather than keeping costs down and profits high.

If you’re looking at ways to improve your customer service that can benefit everybody involved, it’s worth considering CCaaS. With its cloud-based capabilities and a list of pros that outweigh the problems many businesses face with traditional on-premises options, this contact centre solution is becoming increasingly popular with businesses of all sizes and scales. To find out how your teams can do more with less and provide the best customer experience possible, discover our complete guide to CCaaS here.

What does CaaS mean?

CCaaS is an acronym for ‘Contact Centre as a Service’. This cloud-based software provides customer communication functions without the need for traditional call centre equipment. Instead, the software is delivered via the cloud and can be as part of a monthly or annual subscription, similar to how other SaaS operate.

CCaaS streamlines customer touchpoints into a singular platform, whether customers tend to interact through web chat services, emails or calls. By consolidating customer interactions into a single contact centre solution, businesses can focus on delivering value at each touchpoint throughout the customer journey.

The main difference between CCaaS and contact centre premises is that CCaaS is cloud-based which means it can be delivered from anywhere, at any time and on any device. Contact centre premises, on the other hand, are fixed locations from which your teams can deliver customer service using equipment that’s set up for use at that location. Other differences include flexible payment plans with CCaaS subscriptions and quicker implementation for the cloud-based services compared with bringing in specialist hardware and technology for on-premises centres.

Top CCaaS Features

CCaaS is a top choice for contact centres because of its features. From call queuing to interactive voice response, we’ll take you through everything it provides for businesses and how it all works.

Dynamic Call Queuing

Call queuing allows your team to delegate calls more efficiently based on customer needs. Through CCaaS, you can choose how to prioritise callers, reduce average handling time and create better workloads for your agents in the meantime. As a result, agent productivity is boosted, and customer satisfaction is increased because calls can be dealt with in a way that works for your business.

Interactive Voice Response

Another key feature of CCaaS is Interactive Voice Response technology (IVR). This is a popular and efficient communication tool that allows customers to interact with an automated system by pressing different buttons on their phone keypad. The IVR system then automatically routes calls to the best available agent based on pre-defined criteria, such as language preference, issue type, and agent availability. With IVR, customers can be connected to the most suitable agent who can address their needs quickly and efficiently, leaving them happier and more likely to become repeat customers.

AI

Artificial intelligence is evolving at a rapid pace, and its integration with CCaaS has opened up new possibilities for businesses. With AI-powered features like chatbots, voice recognition, and sentiment analysis, customer interactions can be automated as much or as little as you’d prefer, allowing you to free up real agents to handle more complex issues.

Additionally, AI can be used to analyse large amounts of data generated by customer interactions and provide insights that can help businesses improve their overall customer experience.

Key Benefits of CCaaS

CCaaS is mostly successful because of the benefits it offers to customers and businesses. Below are a few of the major advantages of the cloud-based contact centre service.

Delivering better omnichannel customer experiences

Meeting the ever-increasing demands of customers is a daunting job. However, with CCaaS, businesses can offer a variety of communication channels to customers. This gives them the freedom to choose exactly how they want to communicate with your company, whether it’s through email or chatbot. This service can be customised to suit the unique needs of your customer base, enabling you to provide them with the best customer experience possible.

Centralising all customer interactions

Having each customer interaction easily accessible in the same place streamlines the process for customers and your agents. The databases are stored in the cloud with end-to-end encryption for added security and this means that customer service representatives don’t need to spend unnecessary time and effort trawling through siloed information. Teams can then benefit from increased visibility and a quicker process for finding data and past interactions.

Creating a more flexible team

The more flexible your team can be, the better. And with many businesses adopting remote or hybrid working styles, it’s important to bring customer service teams together with effective software. CCaaS provides teams with access to your communication system from any location and on any device. Whether they’re based in your offices and use a PC or work from home and have access to a portable device like a laptop or tablet, this software allows your agents to reach your customers no matter what.

The additional flexibility can also give your business peace of mind that in case an event occurs that prevents access to your contact centre premises, your team can work from home and business can continue as usual without your customers ever noticing a difference.

What are the Differences Between CCaaS, UCaaS and CPaaS?

Other communication services are available for businesses to use, including UCaaS and CPaaS. So, what do these terms mean and how do they work in comparison to CCaaS?

Starting with UCaaS, this stands for ‘Unified Communications as a Service’, which is a collection of communication technologies that offer users real-time team messaging, video conferencing, and voice calls in one centrally managed platform. Similar to CCaaS, this service is cloud-based and allows agents to manage customer communications. However, the major difference is that UCaaS is best suited to businesses offering telephone-focused customer service. This is because the team messaging, video conferencing and workflow automation tools can help teams deal with inbound and outbound calls and improve call centre workforce management.

Meanwhile, CPaaS is an acronym for ‘Communications Platform as a Service’, which is another cloud-based service. The main difference between CPaaS and CCaaS or UCaaS is that businesses can purchase individual APIs and configure only the features they want. This is a more tailored way of gaining the contact centre technology features rather than purchasing a package with APIs and SDKs that aren’t needed within the business. However, it’s important to note that this requires more IT and coding knowledge, which can make it more complicated to integrate.

We hope this guide demonstrates how effective CCaaS can be for your customer service and contact centre operations. From the increased flexibility it offers to the improved efficiency of key customer service processes, it’s worth considering implementing it into your business.

To find out how Gnatta could deliver CCaaS for your business, get in touch.

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