How cloud-based contact center as a service (CCaaS) can help reduce costs

Dec 19

Cloud-based contact center as a service (CCaaS) solutions can offer significant cost-saving and performance-improvement opportunities for customer service operations. In this article, you’ll learn how CCaaS can revolutionize your business.

CCaaS (Contact Center as a Service) provides a number of features and benefits that can help companies reduce costs, improve agent productivity, and enhance the customer experience. By evaluating the cost savings that can be achieved with CCaaS, businesses can make an informed decision about whether this technology is right for them and what type of CCaaS vendor is the best fit for their business.

In this article, we will:

1. Introduce the concept of CCaaS and explain its benefits

2. Describe the features and functionality of a typical CCaaS platform

3. Discuss how CCaaS can help reduce contact center costs

4. Explain how to evaluate potential CCaaS vendors and select the right one for your business

5. Offer advice on how to get the most out of your CCaaS investment

6. Discuss how and why CCaaS will be the future of contact center operations

CCaaS definition and benefits

Cloud-based contact center as a service (CCaaS) is a cloud-based customer service solution designed to streamline the customer experience (CX) and reduce the cost of customer service operations. It is an integrated CX platform that allows companies to manage customer interactions from a single interface. By leveraging the power of cloud-based technology, CCaaS offers significant cost savings over traditional customer service options.

CCaaS provides a number of features and benefits that can help companies reduce costs, improve agent productivity, and enhance the customer experience. The platform includes all of the necessary tools for managing customer interactions such as call routing, email routing, automated processes, reporting, analytics, self-service tools, and more. CCaaS also provides access to additional benefits such as increased scalability, flexible pricing models, and access to the latest and greatest CX technology.

With CCaaS, businesses can reduce capital investments associated with customer service operations by eliminating hardware and software costs, reducing labor costs through automation, and leveraging cloud-based services for lower total cost of ownership (TCO). Additionally, businesses can reduce the time it takes to process customer queries by streamlining and improving employee efficiency. Finally, CCaaS enables companies to offer more personalized customer experiences through better analytics and insights into customer behavior.

CCaaS features and functionality

A typical CCaaS platform provides a suite of features and functions designed to streamline customer service operations. These include:

1. Call routing – Automated call routing ensures that customer calls are directed to the most appropriate customer service representatives based on the customer’s query, the current workload of agents, and other relevant criteria.

2. Automated processes – CCaaS platforms enable companies to automate customer service tasks, such as setting up new accounts or making changes to existing ones, reducing labor costs and time on task.

3. Reporting & analytics – CCaaS provides businesses with better insights into their customer interactions by providing detailed reporting and analytics.

4. Self-service tools – Companies can reduce customer service costs by providing self-service options, such as FAQs and knowledge bases.

5. Scalability & flexibility – CCaaS allows companies to scale their customer service operations up or down in response to changing customer needs, ensuring the right resources are available when they’re needed. These resources being scaled up and down may or may not include the use of live agents as well.

6. Access to the latest technology – CCaaS provides businesses with access to the latest customer service technologies, such as AI chatbots and voice recognition. As these technologies evolve and improve over time, a typical CCaaS provider will include these features in their ongoing subscription or license fees.

How CCaaS reduces contact center costs

The scalability of CCaaS solutions in particular is one of the biggest advantages for companies looking to reduce costs. This concept of scalability applies to small early stage startups and larger established brands alike. With the ability to add or remove agents as needed, businesses can easily scale up or down when their customer service needs change.

This eliminates the need to purchase software licenses or equipment upfront, resulting in significant cost savings. Automation and self service tools provided by CCaaS solutions also help reduce headcount for a brand of any size, while still improving customer experience and the specificity of customer feedback.

Another advantage of CCaaS is its flexibility. Companies have the ability to customize their contact center operations and workflows to meet the needs of their customers. This means they can tailor customer service offerings such as self-service, automated chatbots, live agents, and more to best suit the needs of their customers. By simply focusing on the best mix of communication channels to optimize customer experience, companies can simultaneously reduce customer service operation costs.

Finally, CCaaS solutions are able to provide businesses with cost savings in the form of improved agent productivity and customer experience. By utilizing features such as analytics and automated workflows, agents can quickly identify customer issues and resolve them faster. This not only saves companies money by reducing the time spent on customer service issues, but also enhances the customer experience.

Rush Order provides this free outsourced CX calculator to tally the exact savings you can expect from a typical CCaaS solution. There's no email address entry or other obligation required to use this tool. Give it a spin!

How to evaluate potential CCaaS vendors and select the right one for your business

The decision to switch to a CCaaS solution can be a difficult one. It's important to carefully evaluate potential CCaaS vendors and select the right one for your business. Here are some tips to help you make an informed decision:

1. Understand your needs – Before selecting a vendor, it’s important to understand your customer service requirements and how a CCaaS solution can fulfill those needs. You should be able to clearly and concisely answer why you are looking to outsource CX.

2. Evaluate the features – Make sure the vendor you choose offers features that will help your business improve its customer experience, such as analytics, automation, and self-service tools.

3. Consider scalability – Be sure to select a vendor that offers scalability, so you can easily add or remove agents and supporting technology tools as needed. Expensive software licenses should be easy to add and subtract as well.

4. Determine cost savings – Calculate the potential cost savings of switching to a CCaaS solution with Rush Order’s free calculator.

For further reading on how to select the best CCaaS vendor or outsourced CX partner for your business, please check out the following:

How to get the most out of your CCaaS investment

One of the most important ways to maximize value from your CCaaS solution is to create an in-depth business case outlining the expected costs associated with CCaaS adoption, as well as the expected return on investment (ROI). This can help companies understand exactly where their money is going and what they should expect from their new contact center solution. By using the expected versus real ROI as your guiding metric, you can ensure your outsourcing initiative is progressing as you hoped.

Equally important, you will need to benchmark your customer satisfaction and similar CX performance metrics before implementing your new CCaaS solution, during the implementation, and after the implementation is complete. The goal is to drive improved margins with hard cost savings, as well as to create a better customer experience that drives top and bottom-line performance for your business.

If you are not already doing so, implement the CX balanced scorecard every eCommerce brand should be using. Learning how to properly manage your newly outsourced CX solution is also critical.

The future of CCaaS

CCaaS is quickly becoming the go-to customer experience (CX) solution for contact centers worldwide. This style of cloud-based customer service provides companies with an expansive suite of features, such as customer relationship management (CRM), call routing, and analytics solutions aimed at optimizing customer engagement at the lowest cost possible.

CCaaS platforms are set to revolutionize the customer experience industry. They make it easier than ever for companies of all sizes to create personalized customer journeys and increase customer satisfaction with their services. And, these things will only get easier to build within a CCaaS environment over time. With built-in integrations, CCaaS platforms can easily integrate with existing and new systems alike, thus providing limitless possibilities to improve efficiencies and create better customer experiences.

Parting Thoughts

Cloud-based contact center as a service (CCaaS) can be an invaluable tool for eCommerce brands. With enhanced scalability, robust features, and real-time insights into customer data, CCaaS solutions provide customers with a seamless and personalized service experience at a lower cost.

To learn more about how Rush Order can build your desired CCaaS solution and take your customer service operations to the next level, please contact us to schedule a free consultation. There's no pressure and no obligation.