Flexibility. Scalability. Easy deployment across numerous sites. Seamless integration between external and internal communications. Painless connectivity for all the channels your customers are using. Simple, predictable costs.
There are many good reasons for running a contact centre system in the cloud. The examples above are just some of the attractions which are helping the cloud contact centre market grow at an estimated CAGR of 25 per cent.
But what exactly does contact centre-as-a-service (CCaaS) involve? Are these separate, specialist services which run alongside the rest of your UC infrastructure? Or is it possible to run contact centre systems within broader cloud UC or productivity suites, like Microsoft Skype for Business Online or Office 365?
This is a something global hosted UC provider West Unified Communications Services - West UC, for short - specialises in. Offering complete end-to-end /unified-communications/ucaas solutions across conferencing, collaboration and voice, West has won accolades for the way its services streamline internal and external comms.
In particular, its hosted contact centre solutions are widely acclaimed, helping the company earn a ranking as Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant six years in a row. These services include specialist contact centre solutions for Skype for Business Online.
To get some answers to some important questions we spoke West's own Enda Kenneally, VP Sales & Business Development and Charlie Doubek, VP Product and Sales Engineering.
Enda Kenneally explained some of the attractions and challenges of running contact centre solutions through Skype for Business Online: “Understandably, many businesses want to take advantage of having a cloud-based voice solution and the features offered by Microsoft with Skype for Business. However, they also need an enterprise-grade voice solution that includes voice gateway, PCI compliance and the contact centre element.
“West is the first Microsoft partner to achieve full native integration of a cloud contact centre platform into Skype for Business. This enables customers to move their entire telephony environment, including the contact centre, to the cloud and benefit from the associated cost savings, productivity and efficiency gains and customer experience improvements.”
The West CCaaS solution
Although Skype for Business Online does support connectivity to the PSTN phone network and functions as a comprehensive cloud PBX for call management, it does not provide specific contact centre functions such as supervisor monitoring and queue management. Nor does it support call recording and PCI-DSS compliance.
West provides all of these with its Cloud Contact Pro product. Cloud Contact Pro is a hosted multichannel contact centre platform for inbound, outbound and blended operations. It allows clients to design their own call flows, leverage expertise across a business for customer service with intelligent routing, and delivers powerful analytics and reporting options.
It makes these features available through Skype for Business Online by integrating with the in-built Office 365 Phone System and PSTN Calling plan. Once it is configured with Skype for Business, end users sign in to a browser-based Cloud Contact Pro portal, but then make or receive calls via the Skype for Business client app.
Call recording is fully integrated with Cloud Contact Pro, but it can also be deployed as a stand-alone feature for Skype for Business Online without the rest of the contact centre suite. All recording is PCI-DSS and HIPAA compliant, including full security protection and auditing capabilities.
