Customer experience (CX) plays an important role in deciding whether to continue business with a brand or switch to a competitor. Customer loyalty no longer depends on the product or price alone; crucial is the experience they receive. Tellingly, customers are willing to pay more when CX is great.
A rewarding experience is a major driver of improved customer acquisition and retention rates that drive sales, increase the lifetime value of customers and boost your profits. Failing to keep up with the increasing demands of your customer could result in losing their business.
Your contact center is a major point of contact for delivering a memorable and worthwhile brand experience. Therefore, contact center managers must always strive to provide seamless CX. Effectively using a contact center enables you to improve your customer experience and services while enhancing your brand’s reputation.. One of the best ways to exceed customer expectations and maximize CX is by investing in a contact center as a service (CCaaS).
What is contact center as a service?
CCaaS is a cloud-based customer experience solution that allows companies to use the software of the contact center provider. This means that contact center managers only pay for the technology they need to deliver exceptional CX and maximize business outcomes.
With CCaaS, a contact center’s need for internal IT support is reduced while agents’ capabilities to serve customers better is increased, all at a lower cost. Using the cloud-based contact center model offers contact center managers the unique opportunity to handle customer concerns easily, quickly and efficiently at less cost.
The functionalities of CCaaS are valuable to your sales and customer support staff that spend most of their time on the phone and also need to integrate other business tools to collate customer stats.
Benefits of contact center as a service
The growth of the CCaaS industry has seen an annual upward trend of roughly 50%. Here are 5 practical benefits of CCaaS:
· Improved customer experience
Customers are at the heart of any contact center, yet these centers are often less efficient. Contact center as a service offers solutions that are designed with the customer in mind through the inclusion of powerful analytic interfaces that provide actionable call center insights, and multichannel integration that allows agents to respond to queries from communication channels customers prefer, including live chat, social media, voice calls and email.
Even better, these CCaaS solutions integrate seamlessly to a unified platform for easy tracking. For instance, contact center managers can determine high call volume periods and waiting times.
· Improved agent experience
Conventional contact center systems hinder the effectiveness of customer service agents because they don’t offer capabilities in sifting through customer data. Separation of product, customer and other important information makes the agent appear uninformed and incompetent at problem-solving.
CCaaS platforms display all critical information on one screen, saving the agents time as well as the pain of browsing through various sources of data while the customer waits online. The system also routes customers to the right agents based on the agents’ skillset.
Agents can also access information on a customer’s past purchases or billing history and other location-based and behavioural demographic customer data with simple screen pop-ups. This improves service delivery while increasing customer satisfaction and the chances of upselling.
· Lower Costs
Running a conventional contact center is expensive because contact center managers need to invest in the initial installation of hardware, software and human resources. Moreover, they need to upgrade the software and hardware over time as they become obsolete. This means more expenses that can be demanding on bottom lines.
Contact center as a service helps contact center managers achieve significant savings because they no longer have to worry about constantly updating software and hardware. A CCaaS provider takes care of the software implementation and licensing, freeing up ample time to improve customer experience. This level of support translates to savings for the business.
· High Scalability
A cloud-based contact center solution is built for flexible scaling, meaning that contact center directors can opt for a plan that meets their current needs and adjust as demand rises or falls. For instance, if sales increase, translating in an increase in revenue, profit and even customer calls, then you can upgrade to a plan that can accommodate your growing needs better.
· Faster Implementation
It takes time to establish and run a conventional contact center and the whole process can be draining. Alternatively, empowering a call center with a CCaaS solution is as easy as installing an app and configuring it to your agents’ devices. Moreover, agents don’t have to work from a central location once they can access the program, which means the need for office space is reduced.
· Better Analytics and Reporting
The ability to gather and analyze customer insights is important if contact center managers want to succeed in providing exceptional customer experience. Contact center as a service lets supervisors integrate and analyze interactions on different channels to obtain the data your businesses need to improve service delivery.
Contact center as a service provides an efficient platform that helps contact center managers improve customer experience by shortening waiting times and ensuring quick connections to agents who have answers customers need.
