White Paper: A Buyer's Guide to CCaaS

Over the past 12 months TNC has seen many of its customers start to consider migrating from a traditional telco or on-premise Contact Centre solution in favour of a Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) solution believing that this could dynamically scale to support increased call volumes and deliver new customer engagement channels and capabilities.

Although many telco and traditional contact centre vendors are scrambling to innovate, there is an increasing perception that their approaches often lack the innovation, agility and scalability that are required to meet customers’ contact centre-specific requirements. Despite their best efforts, they have become and are likely to remain challenged by the CCaaS providers due to their inability to adapt to shifting market conditions, and customer demands.

Given this, the transition is well underway by many businesses to adopt a cloud-based contact centre as-a-service model.

Cloud-based contact platforms appear to offer many benefits for contact centres:

• Scalability through dynamic capacity: The cloud-based nature of the platform enables seamless scalability in line with business demands. This allows the business to manage its peaks and troughs far more cost effectively.
  
• Omni-channel capabilities: Enabling new customer contact channels is far easier and more cost effective as new functionality can be subscribed to and switched on instantaneously. For example, integration to engage on social platforms could be switched on to test the effectiveness and customer satisfaction without having to procure and deploy expensive on-premise infrastructure and licencing.
  
• Flexibility and control: Today's contact centres often have geographically-dispersed offices and customer service personnel. Because CCaaS doesn't require any on-premise infrastructure, cloud-based solutions offer greater flexibility to deploy new contact centres without large upfront capital expenditures.
  
• Innovation and Agility: Organisations are drawn to the agility that cloud-based platforms offer, allowing them to take advantage of continued innovation - at lower cost - to better align with dynamic customer expectations and demands.
  

For organisations considering a cloud model for their contact centre, TNC has defined four "key considerations" to take into account when developing their CCaaS strategies:

1. Baseline - Ensure you fully understand your current environment. For instance, you should analyse utilisation (agent, contact channel and PSTN ingress/egress), normal and peak demand, customer journeys and the current contact centre operating model.
   
2. Challenge the norm - Work with contact centre stakeholders to identify opportunities to improve workflow processes, shorten customer journeys, adopt automation or self-service capabilities as this will enable a more cost effective and efficient transformation to the new CCaaS platform
   
3. Consider the business objectives – Fully consider the growth, commercial, regulatory and competition objectives from the top down. Also consider specific priorities in relation to improving the customer services and engagement experience offered.
   
4. Plan and Prepare – Transitioning your contact centre functions and business process to a CCaaS platform can be a complicated and time-consuming activity. Always allow adequate time and assign capable resources to plan and prepare your business for the change.
   

When selecting a cloud-based service provider for your contact centre, it's critical to understand that not all providers are created equal; a cookie-cutter approach simply doesn't work here. Businesses need to be mindful of working with a provider who can deliver capabilities that align to your company's unique priorities and objectives.

Due to several factors, including but not limited to changing demographics, smartphone proliferation, and “always-on” expectations, there is increased demand from consumers to access and move seamlessly between web self-service, voice and digital channels during customer service interactions and to automatically bring their context with them. Although this context-based routing can be engineered through traditional contact centre models, there is a growing preference for contact centre as a service (CCaaS) offerings due to the flexibility and feature capability available out of the box.

The maturity of the CCaaS has increased over recent years and TNC now sees customers with significant contact centre deployments considering CCaaS as an enhanced replacement of their on-premise offerings.

To help customers with the strategic planning and preparation for CCaaS, TNC has developed a strategy development and transformation framework to assist customers at each step of the sourcing lifecycle; baselining, business case creation, statement of requirement development, option analysis and sourcing strategy.

If you would like to find out more about how we can help you on your CCaaS journey, we would be delighted to talk to you and share our experience and knowledge.

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