Cloud contact center

CCaaS stands for "Contact Center as a Service," a type of software model that allows businesses to "pay as you go." Instead of paying a huge price up front for contact center solutions, the cloud call center pricing model allows them to pay a smaller monthly fee for as long as they want to use the contact center platform.

Most businesses, especially those with remote or distributed employees, will benefit from using cloud call center solutions over on-premises software solutions. The benefits of cloud-based contact center solutions, besides the lower upfront costs that come with switching over to a cloud-based subscription model, include better scalability, easy installation, and other useful functionality, like built-in video conferencing and SMS messaging.

With a cloud-based contact center solution, all your colleagues will be just one instant message away, even if you’re all working remotely.

A good cloud contact center can help improve workforce management and boost your customer engagement, which in turn creates more loyal customers who are likely to stay with your brand for a long time. Cloud contact centers also improve ROI by helping you improve your workforce optimization by giving you access to analytics that show you when to schedule more agents to tackle higher call volumes.

One of the biggest benefits is, of course, how easy it is to set up new agents and make changes to call center teams, which removes a lot of work and time spent waiting for IT help or technicians to make those updates for you. Finally, they can make it easy to automate the kinds of repetitive workflows that can take up a lot of time when you’re running a call center. From using a virtual receptionist and IVR to automate all routing-related workflows, to automating coaching and training for remote agents, there’s so much you can do with a cloud solution.

Any cloud-based contact center should have a few key features. These include a user-friendly interface, omnichannel support or support for the digital channels you use, and integrations with other software you already use. For example, with integrations, if you’re handling all your emails via Microsoft 365 or Google Calendar, you’ll want your contact center platform to integrate with those tools.

Cloud contact centers improve the customer experience by empowering contact center agents and supervisors to do their jobs more effectively. In other words, their ability to help you better meet customer needs is directly related to how much their functionality can make your agents’ lives easier.

Need to maintain your SLAs (service level agreements)? Your agents need to be able to resolve customer queries more quickly and effectively first in order to pick up more calls. Want to have higher CSAT scores? Your agents need to be able to access information easily to answer tricky questions. At the end of the day, a good customer experience is only possible when you empower your agents.

When your agents get to focus on high-value conversations instead of repetitive tasks like call routing, their motivation—and performance—will go up. And if you need to set up new departments with hundreds or even thousands of agents? That’s only possible with cloud call center software or contact center software (it's much, much harder to do with hosted or on-premises solutions).

Using a contact center cloud will also help supervisors maintain consistent agent performance across teams and offices (and even time zones) because they're able to train new hires and coach agents virtually. This has the added benefit of boosting business continuity because you’ll have more consistently trained employees and options for spinning up new contact center teams if anything unexpected happens. No more worrying about providing your employees with equipment—all they need is a phone and they can get to work.

If your business has more than three or four customer support agents, or gets enough phone calls on a daily basis that it starts hindering other aspects of the business, then it’s a sign that you might need some kind of cloud contact center software—regardless of company size. A cloud contact center solution can save small businesses some serious cash, which they can invest into other resources.

Plus, it makes it easier for a small business to be more accessible to callers and customers with features like IVR and call routing, even if you can’t have agents at work at all hours.