If your business is searching for a way to set itself apart by improving customer engagement and satisfaction, deploying a Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solution is an option worth considering.
This type of approach can be a big step for some businesses, so it is understandable that you would want to see a worthwhile return on your investment (ROI).
Thankfully, CCaaS can provide you with an affordable option with predictable monthly pricing that is easy to set up and manage while still possessing powerful contact center features that can let customers contact you virtually anywhere and anytime. So, how can you determine if CCaaS will deliver the kind of contact center ROI you are looking for?
The benefits of a Contact Center as a Service platform
As a start, before focusing on specific CCaaS features, think about the overarching benefits and how that factors into contact center ROI considerations.
Contact Center as a Service brings cloud computing to your contact center to help provide an agile, flexible solution that can be scaled as needed without extra capital investment. New capabilities can be added as required to better serve your customers.
You're still responsible for staffing your contact center with a team of agents who can engage with customers by phone or other channels, but the CCaaS model takes care of the infrastructure elements for you. This helps to reduce the pressure on your own IT team.
This ability to help future-proof your business and reduce the workload of your IT team, particularly in a time of IT industry labor shortages, strengthens the case for investment.
Contact Center as a Service features
When it comes to considering CCaaS features, it helps to match them against your own needs and measurements of success. Each business will be different, so it is important not to take a one-size-fits-all approach but rather select only those you need. Relevant features to consider include:
- Automatic call distribution: Being able to queue contacts and distribute them to the right agents is a core function. Automatic call distribution can help improve customer satisfaction and agent utilization by matching agents with the right callers.
- Interactive Voice Response (IVR): This feature helps to determine contact routing and provides self-service capabilities for the caller that you can customize. IVR reduces the demand on agents which can help reduce wait times.
- Real-time visibility: Your CCaaS platform should be able to provide real-time status updates, whether it's regarding queue levels, agent status or quality of service levels. This allows you to make data-informed decisions that can help impact customer satisfaction.
- Robust reporting: Accessing and analyzing data and performance metrics will be crucial in conversations around contact center ROI, so your Contact Center as a Service solution should be able to share data to guide your customer service initiatives and inform the business more broadly. The ability to connect your platform with existing customer relationship management (CRM) and helpdesk solutions will be important in this regard.
- Automation and AI capabilities: Tools such as self-service options, chatbots and virtual assistants should be built into your workflows. They can seek out customer details and relevant information that can help your agents more easily solve customer problems and improve productivity by allowing agents to focus on the most challenging customer issues while reducing repetitive tasks.
- Omnichannel integration: Given the omnichannel expectations of today's customers, your unified communications as a service (UCaaS) solution as well as all other customer communication channels (including website chatbots, email and social media) should integrate with your CCaaS platform in order to enable to agents to collaborate with subject matter experts outside of the contact center, but within the organization, to help resolve an issue. Further, integration is especially critical to measure your contact center ROI because a separate technology stack for your contact center that doesn't integrate well with the rest of your communications infrastructure creates more work for your staff and could affect your total cost of ownership (TCO).
Bring together ROI, TCO and CX
TCO includes both your initial investment and your costs over time, so it's an important consideration for realizing contact center ROI. It's critical that you understand the operating costs you'll incur with your contact center provider of choice, including training and technical support. TCO will provide you insights on how to get ROI over the longer term.
What is equally important as TCO is how your contact center contributes to the overall customer experience (CX). Your contact center is a key part of your ability to understand your customers and get insight from data collected from their experiences. You should be gathering and analyzing key performance metrics (KPI) that can help CX improvements, personalization and mapping customer journeys.
Your contact center platform is more than just about serving customers, it's about transforming their experience by engaging with them more effectively so that you can realize contact center ROI and meet your business goals.
Learn how Verizon's Contact Center Hub can transform your customer experience.
The author of this content is a paid contributor for Verizon.