CCaaS
A CCaaS platform helps you meet customer expectations
Businesses must meet customers where they are, or else their competitors will do so instead. If you’re not providing an omnichannel customer experience that makes it effortless for customers to get their queries answered, they won’t be your customers for long.
That’s why Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solutions like RingCentral Contact Center and RingCX are increasingly critical. They provide your agents with a holistic solution packed with features to boost CX, which they can access virtually anywhere.
All the CCaaS features you need to delight customers and agents
If you choose RingCentral Contact Center or RingCX as your CCaaS software, you get everything you need to deliver the effortless experiences your customers deserve. Here are just a selection of the best CCaaS features your teams can have at their fingertips:
Interactive voice response (IVR), automatic call distribution (ACD) & call routing
First of all, you can rest assured that you have all the basics of phone-based customer service covered. That means CCaaS key features like:
- Interactive voice response (IVR): Interactive voice response or IVR is an automated system that takes calls and presents customers with a menu-based options tree they can interact with via voice or using their phone keypad. It can be set up to offer self-service solutions, as well as to route calls to human agents, depending on what the caller needs.
- Automatic call distribution (ACD): The IVR works in tandem with automatic call distribution (ACD) to route calls according to preset rules.
- Call routing: Intelligent call routing directs each call optimally, so customer queries are resolved as quickly as possible.
Omnichannel capabilities
What is Contact Center as a Service if not a way for your organization to provide seamless customer experience across channels? RingCX and RingCentral Contact Center are omnichannel solutions that allow your customers to contact you via voice, webchat, email, and over 30 digital channels, including the most popular social media platforms.
These powerful cloud-based solutions eliminate communication silos, enabling your agents to deliver consistent, personalized service regardless of how customers reach out. With intelligent routing, comprehensive analytics, and AI-powered tools, you can optimize agent efficiency while reducing customer wait times. The intuitive interface requires minimal training, allowing your team to focus on what matters most—creating meaningful connections with customers that build loyalty and drive business growth.
Workforce management
A top-tier CCaaS system should come with features that help you get the most from your team. RingCX puts your agents in the driving seat with its workforce management functionality.
Not only will your employees benefit from tailored feedback on their performance, but they’ll also be able to take control over some of the more practical elements of the job. For instance, they can use the self-service interface to schedule requests and bid on or trade shifts.
Call monitoring
It’s essential you keep track of the quality of the service your agents provide to ensure a consistent standard of customer care. Call monitoring options like those provided by RingCentral allow you to do just that.
Supervisors will be able to listen in to live calls, join them, and even take them over completely if needed. It’s an excellent way of assessing agent performance and very useful for training and coaching purposes.
Built-in analytics
One of the major aspects of CCaaS that sets it apart from traditional call center solutions is the sheer wealth of analytics options that come built-in.
RingCentral Contact Center comes with customizable dashboards you can tailor to the needs of each employee or team. It’s also possible to monitor overall performance and service levels and stay informed on a granular level about important indicators, such as employee workload and queue information.
Advanced AI-powered functionality
Recent advances in AI technology have made all kinds of new features possible. You can deploy sentiment analysis and conversational intelligence in real time to determine a customer’s state of mind in-call. This can help identify calls that need to be escalated quickly, so they can be prioritized.
More generally, artificial intelligence can help give in-call guidance to agents to help them deal with tricky queries. It can also be used to generate performance scores automatically, so supervisors can see at a glance how each member of their team is performing.
Unpacking the meaning of CCaaS: What is CCaaS?
Let’s begin by establishing a basic CCaaS definition: what is CCaaS and what does CCaaS stand for?
CCaaS stands for Contact Center as a Service. It’s a cloud-based solution for businesses, enabling them to manage both inbound and outbound contact center operations efficiently, providing top-tier service to clients at a fraction of the cost of traditional on-site call centers.
With as-a-service solutions, you subscribe to software from a vendor who takes care of all the necessary physical infrastructure at their end. So, with Contact Center as a Service, you’re leasing the CCaaS software for a monthly or annual fee. This gives you access to the service and all the contact center features included in your plan.
What about Call Center as a Service?
If you assumed that CCaaS stood for Call Center as a Service, you weren’t too far off the mark. But in the modern omnichannel business environment, knowing the difference between a contact center and a call center is crucial.
Traditional outbound and inbound call centers dealt with phone calls, and that was it. As such, they could use call center software as a service that only catered to that one channel. However, if the only option your customers have to contact you is via the telephone, your customer service could be falling short.
These days, a substantial proportion of your customers will prefer to contact you using other methods: SMS, perhaps, or by messaging your company on a social media account.
Catering for every communication taste might sound complicated, but there’s a simple solution: The contact center. This acts as a hub for all your customer service communications.
Your agents can take phone calls, as well as deal with queries that come in by SMS, webchat, email, messaging apps, or any number of other digital channels. Essentially, a contact center makes it easy for your customers to reach out to you using their channel of choice.
On-premises vs cloud-based Contact Center as a Service
That’s the “contact center” part of CCaaS, but what about “as a Service”? It starts with knowing there are two kinds of contact centers: cloud-based and on-premises.
If you have an on-premises contact center, all the equipment you need to run it will be on-site. That means your company will be responsible for buying and maintaining the physical infrastructure of the system. It also means scaling up can be costly and time-consuming.
This is where CCaaS can help. Because it’s cloud-based, all the infrastructure is maintained by the provider. The only thing each user in a company needs to access a CCaaS system is a suitable device and an internet connection.
If your company is experiencing a rapid growth phase, you can easily add as many users as you want simply by sending a request to the provider. And similarly, you can delete users just as fast. This makes CCaaS particularly well suited to businesses that experience seasonal fluctuations in service requirements.
When you explore the kinds of plans that are available for CCaaS, you’ll find that they tend to follow a pay-as-you-go model that gives you excellent flexibility. Unlike with an on-premises contact center, you don’t run the risk of being stuck paying for equipment you no longer need.
CCaaS vs. UCaaS: What’s the difference?
CCaaS is just one type of communication solution for businesses. If what you’re looking for is less about customer service and more about meeting your general communications needs, you might want to consider a UCaaS solution (Unified Communications as a Service) instead.
The two abbreviations are often confused, but there is an important difference between CCaaS and UCaaS.
UCaaS means that all your business communications—phone, video, messaging, and more—are “unified” in a single platform.CCaaS, as we’ve already explored, provides specific tools to help contact centers support their customers and make it easier for agents to do their jobs. These include IVR, skills-based routing, and analytics.
There is some crossover in that both solutions are about improving communication. But while CCaaS relates to external customer communications, UCaaS is most commonly used for internal business communication and team collaboration (of course, companies do also use those unified channels to communicate with customers).
Here’s a handy UCaaS vs. CCaaS table that highlights the key differences:
Platform type
Cloud-based
Cloud-based
Main use
Customer support
Employee collaboration
Used by
Customer service, sales, and support teams
Teams across a business
Type of comms
External communications
Internal communications
Key features
Call routing and distribution, interactive voice response, coaching, analytics
VoIP telephony, video conferencing, SMS, team messaging, online fax, file sharing
Outcome
Improves customer experience and satisfaction
Improves employee communication as well as customer experience
The key business benefits of CCaaS
There are a raft of potential benefits of Contact Center as a Service for your business, from streamlining your contact center operations to improving customer and employee experiences:
Cost savings
As we mentioned earlier, CCaaS is more cost-effective than an on-premises system. You don’t have to worry about the upfront cost of installation or ongoing maintenance—and there’s no need to employ a specialist IT team, as the platform is so easy to set up and use.
You’ll also make savings thanks to the pay-as-you-go subscription model, which means you’re not paying for any seats or features you don’t need. Plus, the boost to customer relationships and sales performance will lead to loyalty and increased revenue.
Flexibility and scalability
CCaaS gives you maximum scalability, as you can easily add or remove seats and features whenever you need to—or upgrade to a higher-tier plan at any time. This is ideal for contact centers, where you’re likely to experience fluctuations in call volumes. It also has you covered for when the business grows or market conditions change.
With cloud contact center solutions, agents can access the system from anywhere, on any device with an internet connection. When you’re not limited to one physical location, you can hire remote staff from across the world, and even set up an entirely virtual contact center that caters for customers in different time zones.
Efficiency and productivity
Contact center software as a service enables you to set up automated workflows for repeatable tasks, saving time and improving productivity for agents and reps. For example, with RingCentral RingCX, you get AI-powered summaries and transcripts after each interaction, so agents don’t have to take notes.
With automation alongside efficient call handling tools, agents can resolve more interactions per shift. They also have more time to focus on complex issues, especially when you deploy self-service options to decrease call volume.
If your solution comes with contact center analytics, you can optimize staff scheduling and quickly fix any operational issues that arise.
Improved customer (and agent) experience
CCaaS platforms mean you can provide omnichannel support to your customers, with a consistent experience across channels and at every touchpoint in the customer journey. They can choose their preferred method of contact for convenience, and every interaction is centralized in one place for easy access to the data.
This data is not only valuable for analytics purposes, but also during live interactions, so agents and reps can instantly view the customer’s history and personalize the conversation accordingly. It’s especially handy if the software integrates with your CRM.
Intelligent call handling features also improve the customer experience, with IVRs and chatbots helping to reduce wait times, and smart routing ensuring that customers don’t get passed around and have to repeat their information to multiple agents.
Valuable insights
Call analytics are beneficial for evaluating contact center performance both in real-time and over longer periods. As well as showing you key performance metrics and highlighting areas for improvement, the best CCaaS solutions also help you to analyze customer behavior, sentiment, and trends through AI-powered tools.
This means you can identify and address common pain points to improve customer engagement and satisfaction. And with insights into agent performance, such as AI-generated score cards, you can see who needs extra coaching. RingCentral also has tools to help agents in real-time, including a live agent assist feature.
Reliability and security
As long as you sign up with a reputable CCaaS provider, you know the platform is going to be reliable. They have the resources to keep the infrastructure maintained, and they use geographically redundant data centers to ensure constant availability and data security.
For instance, RingCentral guarantees 99.999% uptime so you’ll never miss an important customer call. It also has enterprise-grade security and complies with certifications including TCPA, DNC, STIR/SHAKEN, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS.
How to choose the best CCaaS providers
Product features aren’t the only factor you should take into consideration when choosing the best Contact Center as a Service providers. The top CCaaS providers also prioritize other aspects of their service. But how do you choose the right one for you?Here are some questions to help you make the best choice:
What’s the pricing structure?
Make sure you have the full picture when it comes to the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the solution.
Yes, CCaaS platforms are more cost-effective than their on-premises counterparts, but you still need to check for extra costs such as add-on features, customization, and implementation fees. What’s it going to add up to in the long-term?
Look carefully at the different pricing plans available and find out exactly which features and tools are included. Compare the prices across various solutions, and don’t be tempted to go for the cheapest option—it’s unlikely to have the functionality you’ll need as you grow.
Is it easy to set up and use?
Given that one of the advantages of using a cloud-based contact center is supposed to be its ease of use, you should always check how user-friendly a solution is before you decide to choose it. This is where free demos and trials come into their own, as you can try before you buy.
Look for easily customizable dashboards and straightforward setup protocols. After all, you want to be certain that you’ll be able to add and delete users quickly in response to your changing business needs.
You also don’t want to spend a lot of time coaching new users on how to operate the system. Ideally, you want a CCaaS solution that requires only minimal training, so your agents can hit the ground running.
Does it have enterprise-grade security?
In today’s complex digital environment, companies need to know they can rely on their communications systems to be safe and reliable, and the best CCaaS providers make sure their system comes with top-tier security.
There’s no reason to leave safety up to chance, so check that your choice of CCaaS system comes with multiple layers of protection. Look for features including multi-factor authentication, single sign-on, and end-to-end encryption.
Does it integrate with our favorite business tools?
You probably use a variety of business tools in your day-to-day operations, so you should choose a CCaaS system that integrates with them.
Well-designed integrations mean your agents can take full advantage of all of your tools without constantly having to switch between different accounts.
This is one area where a provider like RingCentral truly shines. RingCentral offers over 400 integrations with your favorite tools, including apps like Salesforce, Microsoft Teams, and Google Workspace. There are also APIs so you can create your own.
Is the customer support reliable?
Inevitably, there will be occasions when unexpected issues crop up. When that happens, it’s essential you can access support easily, so they can be resolved as quickly as possible.
Check that the CCaaS provider you select has a clear customer support procedure. It’s also a good idea to explore what existing customers have to say about their experience via review sites since that’s where you’ll find the most candid opinions.
How to implement CCaaS software for businesses
Most CCaaS solutions are designed for quick and easy implementation. But you can follow these steps to ensure a seamless transition to CCaaS:
Define your goals
Do the research
Choose a provider
Configure the system
Train your team
Monitor progress
CCaaS: The present and future of your business
There’s never been a better time to switch to a cloud-based CCaaS solution. The benefits your company will gain in terms of flexibility, cost savings, and customer satisfaction make it the obvious choice.