The contact centre is one of the most rapidly evolving aspects of the communication landscape today. In an era where experience is the key to success, the contact centre has been forced to adapt to an ever-more demanding marketplace of customers from multiple generations and environments.
The only way to keep up with this ever-evolving space is to move into an environment where flexibility and scalability are everywhere. Contact Centre as a Service “CCaaS” solutions give businesses of all sizes the opportunity to tap into the tools that they need to transform customer satisfaction in seconds.
Eliminating the issue of IT investments and complex hardware, CCaaS delivers pre-packaged functionality in an agile environment that’s perfect for consistent growth. The result of this infinite flexibility is that Gartner predicts 50% of contact centres deployed from this year forward will be available within the cloud.
Let’s take a closer look at CCaaS and the trends that are helping it to evolve.
Migrating to CCaaS and Choosing a Vendor
Businesses from all backgrounds are rapidly recognising the value of having a scalable and efficient contact centre in the cloud. However, unless you’re a small business that’s just getting started, making the transition from an on-premise environment into a cloud space can be complex. Companies with a lot of existing investments in the on-premise world make it difficult to switch over at a rapid pace.
To ensure that organisations have the freedom that they need to move at a pace that suits them, vendors are offering a wide selection of migration opportunities. There are now public and private cloud solutions, as well as programmable contact centres that are available through APIs and SDKs. Organisations may even use hybrid investments to maintain some of their contact centre on-premise for compliance reasons and move some of it to the cloud.
The CPaaS world even means that some vendors can provide businesses with the tools to connect all of their communication stacks in one place. With a CPaaS solution from the right vendor, companies can build contact centre functionality into their existing UCaaS solutions, making it easy to manage conversations on the backend and frontend of the business in a single pane of glass.
As the flexibility of the contact centre grows, there are even options that allow companies to integrate multiple tools from different vendors and providers. This means that business leaders can get the best results for all of their needs without being locked into a single vendor. As the environment increasingly moves away from the one-size-fits-all approach, integration and interoperability are often common concerns for buyers.
As with most contact centre investments, a strategy in the future of CCaaS starts with choosing the right vendor. Today’s businesses need to think not only about what kind of phased migration their vendors can offer but also:
- How flexible and scalable that contact centre is
- How much the company is invested in interoperability
- What kind of security and privacy components are in place
Entering the Age of the Programmable
As the contact centre evolves, we’re seeing the rise of various new and exciting trends, from global voice offered by programmable numbers that are available all around the world, to artificial intelligence and customer journey mapping.