Choosing a CCaaS for Small and Mid-Sized Organizations Q&A

Customers don’t care how big a firm is; they care about the quality of their customer experience. And today’s smaller and growing businesses can level the playing field by offering customer interactions that are every bit as sophisticated, responsive and high touch as what is offered by their larger enterprise peers. The key for smaller businesses is having a modern, state-of-the-art contact center as a service (CCaaS) platform. Your CCaaS is one of the quickest ways to roll out advanced customer-facing tools, and doing that can help close the competitive gap between larger and smaller organizations.

Any CCaaS an organization considers should first and foremost be able to support growth. That means that scalability and technological innovation should be at the top of the buyer’s list. Cloud deployment has always been good at allowing centers to ramp up or down agent seats in response to changes in customer volume. But CCaaS buyers should look beyond that core competency to consider elements such as the speed at which a platform provider adds new features, as well as its frequency of software updates. It’s worth it to also look for the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, for example, embedded into tools for agent management and customer analytics, or for advanced self-service elements and automated handling of interactions.

These are the kinds of features that large centers take for granted but smaller firms have had a hard time justifying cost-wise. Smaller organizations have relied instead on lower-cost cloud services or on-premises platforms, but trying to expand either of those types of less-evolved systems to meet growing demand may force you to make do with older features that don’t meet the needs of today’s customers.

The most important elements to focus on are the CCaaS feature set itself, and the innovations the provider brings to it. Early adopters looked at the cloud and saw its flexibility and resilience as assets. That’s now a given, and these should be considered pure “table stakes” for any CCaaS. Instead of limiting their thinking to those basics, buyers should look at specific features that raise the level of the service and experiences delivered by a CCaaS.

Your CCaaS should make it easy to transform a contact center into an omnichannel customer communications hub and include the ability for customers to self-serve by accessing up-to-date data sources or automated chatbot sessions. That makes it as easy as possible for the customer to connect with an organization at the time and in the manner of the customer’s own choosing. The agent workforce, on the other hand, needs a software environment that seamlessly integrates applications into an easy-to-use, unified workspace, with customer resources management (CRM) integration built in. A modern CCaaS will also serve up connections to shift-management features, performance tracking, and easy access to training and collaboration tools.

Agents should be connected to supervisors when working remotely, with visibility into key performance indicators (KPIs) on both ends. Supervisors will need easy, accurate reporting, simplified user and configuration administration, performance management reporting, customer interaction analytics and workforce management tools. And leadership should be looking for advanced analytics that track both contact center performance and alignment between the center and the organization’s overall goals.

Another advantage of any modern CCaaS is that it never stands still. Cloud software is continually being updated as new features are developed. Having access to these features protects the smaller business from being stuck with obsolete technology, and prepares it for integration of what may be developed in the future. In short, thinking that the CCaaS decision is mainly about cost is misguided, and basing a decision on cost misses the transformative effects that a CCaaS can have.

Today’s customers have outsized expectations. They expect that they can begin an interaction on one contact channel and end it on another. They expect to be able to break communications, then pick up later, right where they left off. They want to move between automated self-service and human support without losing the thread and without sacrificing quality. They want an experience that is seamless and without friction. As a result, and as organizations evolve their self-service options, the interactions that do make their way to the agent are more complex, requiring deeper training and greater empowerment of the agent workforce.

These changes in customer expectations, then, force equivalent changes in the contact center. When agents are expected to act as both experts and advocates, they need to have the added resources made possible by knowledge management tools powered by AI, as well as automation that guides them with suggested actions based on the specific context. Such advanced tools haven’t been typically available to the small-business contact center in the past, because they’ve been expensive to deploy and maintain on-premises. But cloud delivery makes it possible for any business to raise the bar on its service delivery without overcommitting to local technology resources.

However, even in cases where smaller centers have already been using extended unified communications platforms for their customer interactions, agents often find that the software application development hasn’t kept up with the customer experience. In reality, a modern contact center needs its own software applications, purpose-built for the unique expectations of today’s demanding customers. These software tools can be transformative, especially to the small business trying to leapfrog over several generations of development.

At a minimum, a CCaaS platform should facilitate communication with customers across all relevant contact channels, and should allow a center to direct interactions to the appropriate agent based on skills, availability and other criteria. Those agents should be working in an environment specifically designed for the type of work they do, with a crisp user interface on a workspace that offers easy access to all the applications they need. That includes applications that are shared with other departments, such as CRM or back-office data sources for product information or fulfillment.

So “table stakes” includes all of the integrations a business would need from day one, preferably with open application programming interfaces (APIs) that can be administered without a heavy IT presence. For the contact center manager, the CCaaS should, at a minimum, provide essential workforce scheduling and optimization tools, including performance tracking, real-time collaboration, call recording, quality monitoring and reporting on all of these functions. Advanced self-service capabilities like a conversational interface and an automated problem-solving engine should also be high priority.

With these next-level elements in place, small firms can then branch out to some of the features that will allow them to take contact center operations in more strategic directions. These might include exploring opportunities for advanced analytics and journey mapping, for example, as well as ways to consolidate customer data across departments.

There are both operational and strategic benefits. For operations, a strong CCaaS platform allows a small firm to handle high volumes of interactions of all types with increased efficiency, the sort of productivity and cost-control that larger firms have accessed for years. Even a smaller contact center can grow as the customer base grows, and its agents can exhibit the kind of professionalism and responsiveness that customers demand. At the same time, management can invest the company’s time and resources into improving processes and experiences, rather than expending effort in the struggle to just keep up with increasing customer demand.

Larger firms are increasingly looking at the customer experience as a way to differentiate themselves, and now, smaller firms don’t have to lag behind because of the expense or age of their technology infrastructure. So, looked at strategically, an advanced CCaaS deployment enables a smaller firm to provide the kind of service experience that is comparable to its larger competitors.

Different types of CCaaS will provide certain advantages in different measures. While virtually all platforms provide the benefit of scaling up or down and shifting costs from capital expenditures to operating expenditures, not every CCaaS can handle the demands of a multichannel environment. And fewer still offer the continual software innovations that are the engines of growth, for example, the entwining of human agents with automated systems, or the deep collaborative features required by agents and supervisors in a work-from-home environment.

Every small business is unique, and each finds itself facing its own challenges. The CCaaS an organization chooses has to have the right mix of features and innovative functions to enable smart business change. That means that for a growth-focused contact center buyer, the choice of a CCaaS platform is crucial, a decision not to be made lightly.