It remains an economic balancing act for contact centre executives everywhere: improve the quality of customer interactions, but minimise the expenses to do it.
To solve this problem, many executives are turning to communications as a service (CaaS) and its pay-as-you-go approach to upgrade the functionality and flexibility of their contact centres. The advantages of CaaS are many, but three benefits in particular are why contact centre decision-makers should evaluate a CaaS solution.
1. Minimised start-up and ongoing costs
2. Access to advanced contact centre applications
3. Increased flexibility for a dynamic business environment
Minimised start-up and ongoing costs
Total cost of ownership (TCO) metrics is an integral part of determining the return on investment (ROI) for a technology purchase. For a premise-based contact centre solution, costs can add up for software, hardware, implementation services, data centre infrastructure requirements, system maintenance, upgrades, monthly subscription, and IT staff.
According to research conducted by Frost & Sullivan, for a 100-seat contact centre, the hosted or CaaS model offers a total cost saving of 23% over five years versus the same premise-based solution. Hosted contact centre solutions help eliminate high costs for maintenance and upgrades associated with premise-based solutions. Staffing and implementation costs are also significantly reduced.
With workforce expenses contributing the largest percentage of a contact centre's operational costs, retaining high performing agents is critical to keeping those costs in check. By taking advantage of a CaaS deployment's flexible architectures - which are increasingly being offered via a choice of IP-based LAN, WAN and MPLS networks - companies can expand their contact centres virtually rather than expanding costly brick and mortar buildings.
Advanced contact centre applications for centres of every size
With the suite of applications a CaaS offering provides, contact centres of any size can get the same communications functionality previously attainable only by larger companies looking to implement on-premise equipment:
Workforce management
A CaaS-based, fully integrated workforce management (WFM) solution can simplify scheduling by determining forecasting based on historical data. Schedules are generated to accommodate vacation time, schedule changes, agent skills, and labour laws. The final piece is monitoring agents for adherence to the schedule. By using CaaS for WFM, an organisation can trial this technology for a small monthly fee and start making more informed, more accurate decisions about agent scheduling.
Companies can expand their contact centres virtually rather than expanding costly brick and mortar buildings.
Dave Paulding is Interactive Intelligence's regional sales manager for UK and Africa.
Intelligent ACD routing
Intelligent ACD routing using skills makes it possible to route multi-channel interactions across the entire agent pool, regardless of location and including remote work-at-home agents. Especially in making multi-site contact centres a virtual entity, CaaS ACD can optimise routing decisions based on any combination of queue metrics, media type, agent skills and availability, and call attributes.
Outbound dialling
Predictive and preview outbound dialling using a CaaS solution can help the business generate additional revenue, keep agents productive and better manage customer relationships. Predictive dialling, for instance, can streamline collection efforts and improve call connection rates. It can also fill sales pipelines through a campaign targeted to thousands of consumers in one manageable effort.
Quality monitoring
Quality monitoring, first and foremost, ensures the contact centre is performing at peak performance by maintaining a balance between agent utilisation and customer service levels. When it's in real-time and coming from a CaaS solution running on an all-in-one platform, quality monitoring can provide complete visibility across every application the contact centre leverages.
Fewer in-house IT resources required
Shifting configuration changes down to the business unit level allows a contact centre to implement changes far more rapidly - and more straightforwardly since a manager knows exactly what's required in a call routing routine or for an outbound campaign.
Increased flexibility for a dynamic business environment
Another advantage of the CaaS model is that it doesn't require a communications infrastructure rip-and-replace to get started. Regardless of an organisation's existing network and telephony architecture, there are flexible CaaS deployment options to fit a contact centre's needs. Available deployment models include traditional Time Division Multiplex, networked voice over IP (VOIP), or a hybrid approach using both TDM and VOIP.
Adjust according to no hidden costs or downtime
The need to quickly respond to changes in call volume, revenue targets and customer service levels, without adding costly new infrastructure, and definitely without the lag time required to install it, is crucial for contact centres. A major benefit of the CaaS model is the ability to scale up and down on a monthly basis. Organisations can contract for a minimum set of technology and capacity to meet their average requirements.
Share