What is CCaaS?
Also known as: Contact Centres as a Service
Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) is a cloud-based software that gives businesses access to the provider’s contact center solution through a scalable, pay-as-you-go pricing model where specific features are available on an as-needed, a la carte basis.
CCaaS technology (also called hosted contact center software) is entirely hosted and maintained by the provider — not the end-user — in an offsite data center. This means CCaaS users avoid the costs of expensive hardware and in-house IT teams while benefitting from a solution that evolves alongside their business needs.
A Brief History of Contact Centres
For decades, contact centres have relied on quality voice infrastructure to underpin them, which remains steadfast despite the changes in industry and advances in CCaaS technology. Over the years, the capability of communications service providers (CSPs) like Colt has evolved to provide the infrastructure to support vendor technologies and, more recently, build service models to offer complete managed services. The simple “We manage your technology so you can manage your business” business model.
Contact Centre solutions were initially all about voice channels, developed to manage sophisticated ways for agents to share telephony services like phone lines, queues, mailboxes and access to customer records. They were effectively leaving breadcrumbs so a business could manage teams rather than relying on individuals. These principles extended to email and other digital channels to allow customers new ways of interacting with their suppliers. Fold into that bolt-on solutions to manage recordings, reporting, workforce schedules, training, skills and compliance, and we begin to see the picture of the modern contact centre manager’s landscape.
So what’s new? The vendor community for CCaaS – like UCaaS and so many other software tools – have mastered the transition to the cloud. For customers, this is an end to significant release cycles, finding themselves stuck on ageing versions, having to source capital to upgrade the tech providing critical business applications and deploy internal change programs to accommodate them. Modern upgrades happen overnight or even during the day. No one has to pay, and the changes are organic. Critically, tech vendors can continually develop, test and release innovations and features and support ever-increasing integrations whilst maintaining a consistent release offering to all subscribers of the technology.
The second all-important piece is bringing the tech together. The best vendors build around their core platform and advance features that were previously only add-ons to solutions. This harmonisation of the critical elements enables vendors to offer bundled solutions that are effectively cheaper than buying several parts and removes integration costs. Additionally, the development of these features ensures they all work together, reducing the costs further down the lifecycle.
If we have all moved to the cloud, how do we differentiate?
Differentiation is far from dead. Having mastered managed services, CSPs can differentiate offerings through their unique product and service mix. And at Colt, the reliance on quality voice – for which we are renowned – is supported by our award-winning core network that connects Colt’s global reach directly to the vendor’s cloud. We operate in this market because we built a foundation that we know can support it and have been doing so for decades. The timing is perfect to partner with the vendor community: experts in building market-leading software. This new model for the modern telco defines our journey to becoming a tech-co.
The shift to the cloud was inevitable and primarily functional. The real excitement comes from advancing the technology itself, enabled by this shift. Let’s start with one of the most overused terms of the modern age: “digital”. Digital for CCaaS is the explosion of new ways for customers to reach their chosen businesses. Email, for example, isn’t new, but in a CCaaS enabled business, those emails land in the same ‘queues’ as the calls coming into the call centre. Many customers love being able to open a chat session with a service provider or retailer to ask a simple query – so much quicker than waiting in a queue. These days, the savvy business is aware of their presence on social media and the positive impact turning around a very public complaint can have on their relationship with customers. This attitude is genuine engagement – enabled by technology, empowering the budding generation of customer service teams. That is just the beginning of the journey our customers are making when they seek out the benefits of putting customers at the centre of their business. An omnichannel approach is the first clear sign that a company is seeking to transform their business to be genuinely customer-centric, putting customer experience at the core of its commercial success. We take our customers on every step of this journey.
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