What is Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS)?

⏱ Reading Time: 8 minutes

According to a study by Accenture, 48% of consumers expect specialized treatment for being a good customer.

Customer service is more important than ever. There’s so much competition out there that customers can easily switch to another service if they are not satisfied with yours. Huffington Post published an article in which they declare that 91% of customers who are unhappy with a brand just leave without complaining.

To enable long-term growth, there is no way around building a high-quality customer service team that makes people happy. However, that shouldn’t be the only goal of your customer service. 

🚀Read Customer Service: A Guide for Successful Business Growth🚀

There’s one thing much more important – ROI. ROI = Return on Investment is an economic key performance indicator to measure the return of business activities. In fact, it doesn’t make sense to invest in something that isn’t profitable for your business. 

If your ROI is negative – you’ll ruin your business.

If your ROI is positive – you’ll be able to grow your business.

It’s really that simple.

So finally: How can you achieve a positive ROI through your customer service?

Easy. There’s one simple solution called Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS).

And if you want to know what Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) is all about, you’ve come to the right place.

Here’s what we’re going to cover in this article:

• What is Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS)?
• The benefits of CCaaS
• The requirements of CCaaS

Let’s start.

What is Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS)?

Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) is a cloud-based customer service software solution. CCaaS enables companies to only purchase the software technology they need for their customer service and is operated by a vendor who hosts the software on an external server to reduce your company’s internal IT costs.

Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) is an excellent solution for contact centers and provides scalability as business requirements change. 

CCaaS offers a high level of flexibility because companies can only purchase the technology they need to do their customer service properly. Therefore, companies can reduce IT costs and improve their customer service at the same time.

Due to the growing demand for world-class customer service, CCaaS is the best solution for today’s businesses that want to scale their customer service, improve customer experience, reduce costs, and get more done in less time.

Read How to Improve Customer Service and Ensure Customer Satisfaction

Picture 1. Contact center as a Service

Benefits of Contact Center as a Service 

Software solutions offer benefits for companies and help them achieve their business goals faster. As the importance of customer service grows, it is vital for companies to improve their customer service, raise the average customer lifetime value, and increase their ROI. 

According to a study by customerthermometer, Americans pay 17% more to do business with firms with great reputations when it comes to customer service. Also, when asking consumers what impacts their level of trust with a company, offering excellent customer service ranked number one.

So it’s clear that it’s uber important to provide awesome customer service if you want to stay competitive in the coming years.

CCaaS can help you do so. Here are five benefits CCaaS can bring to your business:

Customer Experience

Customers feel a way better when they have multiple possibilities to contact a company. There are people who prefer to contact a company by phone, others prefer to write an email and others will prefer to contact a company via WhatsApp or Twitter.

Contact Center as a Service makes it all possible. Customers can contact your company through different channels and your agents will receive all requests through one platform. 

This is much better for your customer service employees than receiving all inquiries through 10 different channels. It reduces the response time to a minimum and increases your overall ROI from customer service.

If you can’t exceed your customer’s expectations by getting back to them quickly, your customers will only be annoyed by your company. 

Considering that the average American tells 15 people when they have had a poor customer service experience, it would be a total disaster for your business.

Read Omnichannel Customer Experience as a Competitive Advantage

Picture 2. Customer experience stats

Scalability

As your business grows, you need to scale your customer service. In these times, customers have more opportunities than ever to move to another company. They expect world-class customer service.

Across the globe, 96% of consumers say customer service is an important factor in their choice of loyalty to a brand.

If you can provide it, customers will stay with your company and you’ll be able to increase your customer lifetime value dramatically.

Using CCaaS is the easiest way to scale your customer service. If you need more features, you can easily purchase them and use them. If you want to hire more agents – no problem – you can purchase more licenses.

Higher Efficiency

Being a customer agent is a stressful job. But CCaaS can make the work of agents ten times easier. With CCaaS, agents have all customer information in one place. They don’t have to switch between different applications to get their job done.

Traditional contact centers don’t offer this benefit. Customer information, product information, and other information is stored in other siloed systems. This makes it hard for agents to explore customer data and provide specific service to customers.

It’s especially difficult for agents when they receive requests through different channels. 

CCaaS solves this problem.

With CCaaS, they can receive requests from different channels like Twitter, WhatsApp, email, and more in one single application. This is much easier to handle than receiving requests from 10 different channels.

Read Customer Service Agent Guide for Beginners

Save Costs

CCaaS doesn’t require an initial installation with high costs. It also doesn’t require regular updates to keep running. Your IT team also doesn’t need to manage expensive hardware or something similar.

The costs are very transparent because you outsource IT support to your vendor. You pay a monthly flat fee per agent and that’s it.

It will be much easier for you to budget and plan your business initiatives when you know exactly what you’re going to pay in the future.

With a local solution, some vendors may increase the price of licensing for one year. There can be huge differences between vendors when it comes to licensing, some will offer you fixed contracts, while others won’t.

Better Customer Data

With CCaaS software, you have more customer data in one place that gives you better customer insights. For example, you can create a full customer profile and see how many times a customer has contacted your company and how many products a customer orders throughout the year.

In this way, you’re able to segment different groups of customers and prioritize the ones that are loyal to your company and spend a lot more money annually.

You’re also able to create targeted campaigns based on your recent customers to reach new audiences, increase your revenue, and make more money in the long run.

Read Behavioral Marketing Strategy – How to Get People Clicking

Basic Requirements of Customer Center as a Service Software

Going for a Customer Center as a Service Software takes your company’s customer service to a new level.

However, before you choose a CCaaS software, make sure that it supports the major features you need for your customer service.

Here’s a list of all features that every CCaaS software should support:

Ticketing: A ticketing system is a type of software to handle the reception, confirmation, classification, and processing of customer requests.

Analytics: Showing of data related to request volume, waiting times, and other KPIs that provide the necessary insights to improve customer service.

Integrations: Businesses use many online tools at the same time. They use email marketing tools, automation tools, tools to sell their products on marketplaces like Amazon, social media tools, and so on. CCaaS should enable integrations with business tools such as Zapier, Slack, Hubspot, or Email marketing tools like Mailchimp.

Chatbot: A chatbot is a text-based dialogue system that allows chatting with customers automatically. Customers can use it to communicate with the system in natural language and get the information they need.

Chat Transcript: If Agents communicate with a customer via email, they should be able to send them a chat transcript.   

Feedback Form: The software should be able to easily gather feedback from your customers.

Web Application, Mobile Application, and Desktop Application: Agents should be able to talk to customers anytime, anywhere.

Conclusion

CCaaS is a great way to build high-quality customer service flexibly and efficiently.

Customer requirements have changed dramatically over the last few years – so companies have to adapt to the changing environment.

Outsourcing IT support and other technical activities is ideal for your business. A local customer service center will not only cost you more money – it’s the opportunity costs that make the difference.

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Moritz Bauer is a German marketer specialized in eCommerce. His blog smartminded teaches people about Amazon FBA. When he’s not writing content for his blog, he’s out with friends to have some nice food.