Contact center as a service (CCaaS) is a growing industry. The demand for quick and efficient methods to manage customer service is providing businesses with plenty of options when it comes to refining customer experience (CX). In the wake of a global pandemic, the demand for efficient solutions is creating a rush in the market for virtual call centers centered around the cloud.
What to Look for in a CCaaS Provider to Determine Best Fit
When it comes to finding the best CCaaS company for your business, it can seem like the options are endless. The CCaaS industry is set to see a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15.7% from 2021 to 2028. This future growth comes at the heels of a market explosion in the past few years with a total market value of around $3.8 billion in 2020 alone. By 2028, the market is expected to be worth over $10 billion.
Many companies currently offer CCaaS platforms with similar features. Assessing your options means taking stock of your business requirements and goals and then identifying CCaaS solutions with the right mix of features and services that best support your business’ unique needs.
Essential CCaaS Features
There are both core features and advanced features that you need to consider when choosing a CCaaS provider. Not all CCaaS providers are created equally, but most should, at minimum, offer the following:
- Automatic Call Distribution — The core function of a CCaaS provider is the queueing of contacts and intelligently distributing those contacts to agents based on the business processes of the organization.
- Voice Interaction Handling — A client for agents to use for authentication to the contact center, call control functions, as well as managing their availability.
- Interactive Voice Response — IVR is an important feature for call centers that helps to determine contact routing and provides self-help functions to the caller.
- Historic Reporting — Make sure to view sample dashboards and reports: is it robust, aggregate data that you can modify or customize and share? Think of what you will need to learn from the data, and how you will use it.
- Real-time Status Updates — Any CCaaS solution worth its salt has real time insight into the grade of service being provided, current queue levels, and agent states for management level leaders.
- Integrations — What you don’t want is for your IT team to be stuck with an outlying tech stack addition that doesn’t play nice with everything else. Integrations are key to ensuring you don’t get stuck with something clunky or challenging for end users.
Other typical services may include call conferencing, blacklisting call capabilities, as well as omnichannel services (calls, video, email, chat, etc.).
Essential CCaaS Services
A goal of enlisting a reliable CCaaS provider is to free agents to be customer centric. With less time dealing with processes better left to automation, they can focus more time per call, which can result in happier customers. That’s the ideal outcome.
To achieve that, you also need to make sure that your CCaaS provider serves you well (as their customer). This may require a little sleuthing, because companies that are less dedicated to customer service aren’t going to say so. Here is what you need to investigate:
- Is this company known for being easy to work with?
- Are there multiple ways to reach support people (and can you reach actual people?)
- What kind of onboarding do you get?
- What kind of training do you get?
- Will you have the same reps through all stages of the sales process and onboarding process?
- What kind of reputation does the company have?
All of these are key to defining, or at least discerning, a provider that can stick with you for the long-haul.
But Can it Scale?
A last point of consideration is to evaluate the scalability of the CCaaS provider and system you choose. What your company is today is not what it will be in one, five, or ten years. Hopefully, you grow, and when you do, will this choice be able to grow too?
Scalability questions relate to demand, capacity needs, expanded use cases, expanded features use, etc. You want to consider if there is a lower entry point — if you are currently running a modest operation — and maximal possibilities if you are a large company (or aiming to be). This is a question best addressed by the sales team, but you may also be able to investigate awards, recognitions, press mentions, and even customer testimonials, to get an idea of the kind of companies a CCaaS provider serves.
What Evolve IP Brings to the Table
For mid-size organizations looking to deliver full feature contact center services to their customers, Evolve IP’s Evolve Contact Suite solutions can provide all the features your business needs to succeed in today’s Work Anywhere world.
Named in Gartner’s prestigious Magic Quadrant for CCaaS, Evolve IP offers a unified platform that provides a next-gen CX at a fraction of the cost of comparable solutions. Moreover, Evolve IP offers flexible deployment options that can enable agents to operate at several different endpoints. Together with actionable insights that help your team grow, agents will experience a truly seamless CCaaS product with Microsoft Teams.
To learn why Evolve IP is the essential IT ally for businesses wanting to improve the user experience for both employees and customers while centralizing technology management, contact us today.
