The cloud contact center is gaining momentum as enterprises discover benefits around agility, scalability, and features over a traditional solution. The ability to categorize spending as operating expenses wins over the finance department, while IT teams appreciate the lightening of their maintenance load.

Contact center as a service (CCaaS) solutions are growing in popularity from both migrations by existing contact centers as well as new enterprises. A CCaaS solution reduces or eliminates many of the typical barriers that confront contact centers, such as long implementation schedules, high initial investments, and specialized equipment requirements.

In addition, CCaaS providers regularly offer new features, aligning with app store partners and pursuing AI technologies that allow enterprises to quickly implement improvements to the customer experience.

When evaluating a cloud contact center solution, your enterprise should consider four key philosophical factors before jumping in with a decision:

UCaaS Provider Versus Pure-Play CCaaS: Many unified communications as a service (UCaaS) providers are now offering CCaaS. There may be benefits to choosing your existing UCaaS provider to also implement your cloud contact center solution – specifically around topics like support and procurement. The advantage of choosing a pure-play UCaaS provider is that they tend to be highly focused on CCaaS-specific, advanced features and global coverage.

Integrator: Traditionally, licensed solutions were accessed through a value-added reseller, and many enterprises see the ability to connect directly with the provider as one of the benefits of CCaaS. Many providers welcome this connection too, with services that include trials and self-service provisioning.

Still, there remain many benefits to working with third-party CCaaS specialists, who offer a range of services and related products and may be able to partner with your enterprise to achieve outcome-based design and custom integrations.

WEM: Workforce engagement management (WEM) is an important element of cloud contact centers and is an umbrella term that includes a wide range of tools and applications for contact center performance. In general, organizations tend to purchase routing and voice response from a separate provider than their WEM provider.

There is a growing trend to acquire CCaaS and WEM from the same provider, and any implementation should include a consideration of the benefits of obtaining contact center performance solutions in a bundled package.

Build Versus Buy: While CCaaS is gaining momentum, there is not an off-the-shelf option available, and it still requires customization and configuration. Enterprises may choose to build a completely-from-scratch contact center solution.

There are some components of a CCaaS solution that are plug-and-play, and the gap between CCaaS solutions and from-scratch solutions is shrinking, but development of a custom solution remains a formidable task.If you are considering a cloud contact center solution, contact us at Access Tech. From the four philosophies discussed above to infrastructure upgrade considerations and needs assessment, we can help you through each step of your decision and implementation.