If you’ve been exploring the business software space, you’ve probably come across the term “CCaaS”. But what is it, and why are organizations paying so much attention to it?

What is CCaaS?

CCaaS stands for “contact center as a service”, and it’s essentially a cloud-based platform that lets companies use customer experience and outreach software without having to set up specialized infrastructure at their offices. It’s just one of several “as a service” (XaaS) offerings available today, all of which use the cloud to “rent out” technology to users.

CCaaS software solutions have been steadily growing in popularity simply because they’ve made contact center communications so much easier to manage—allowing agents, representatives, and managers alike to focus on having better customer interactions.

So what do you need to know to leverage CCaaS for your organization? You can read on to find out, or use the links below to jump to the section you’re most interested in.

What are CCaaS solutions?

- What is a call center vs. a contact center?

- Call Center

- Contact Center

- Can CCaaS solutions be used for both contact centers and call centers?

- What is UCaaS vs CCaaS? What’s the difference?

- What is the difference between CPaaS and CCaaS?

Why is CCaaS important?

- What are the benefits of contact center software via CCaaS?

- It improves customer experience

- It optimizes agent experience

- It’s cost-effective

- It’s easy to scale

Factors to consider when choosing CCaaS providers

- Contact center software features

- Interactive Voice Response systems (IVR)

- Automatic Call Distribution (ACD)

- Automated dialers

- Omnichannel support

- CRM integrations

- Other app integrations

- Compliance

- Customer reviews

- Total cost and ROI

CCaaS solutions are unified suites of contact center software that allow businesses to set up omnichannel contact centers without needing to invest in specialized hardware. These not only simplify the setup for these operations, but they also streamline workflows for different modes of customer communications such as:

• Phone or video calls
• Live chat
• Email
• SMS/Text messaging
• And more…

On top of all this, many contact center solutions include analytics capabilities— meaning organizations can mine data for improving processes that enhance customer service.

Because CCaaS is cloud-based, customer support and sales reps can use the software no matter where they are, provided that they have an internet connection. This makes remote and hybrid working possible and supports business continuity.

It’s easy to get started with CCaaS software. Just find a provider, choose a plan, and set up everything from your computer. Your CCaaS provider manages everything else for you—data centers, servers, systems, and even applications.

The best part is that you don’t even have to spend so much on functionality you don’t plan on using. More often than not, you can work with the vendor to ensure your needs are met at any given time, scaling up or down as the situation dictates.

But we might be getting ahead of ourselves a bit here. If “CCaaS” means “contact center as a service”, does this mean it only serves contact centers? What about call centers?

What is a call center vs. a contact center?

Let’s start by exploring definitions.

Call Center

A call center is an organization or department that handles inbound and outbound voice calls from customers. They don’t handle other modes of communication.

Contact Center

A contact center is similar to a call center in that its focus is on communicating with customers (both inbound and outbound). But it takes it another step further by also managing other modes of information exchange like emails, social media, and chat.

So can CCaaS solutions be used for both contact centers and call centers?

Generally speaking? Absolutely. This is because most of them are contact center solutions, which can handle multiple communication channels (including voice calls, which is what’s important for call centers).

It needs to be pointed out, however, that some CCaaS providers may focus more heavily on telephony than on other modes of contact. This effectively puts their offerings closer to the category of “call center technology”, which will make them less than ideal options for the omnichannel contact center.

What is UCaaS vs CCaaS? What’s the difference?

Whereas CCaaS is primarily focused on connecting customers to the company, UCaas (Unified Communications as a Service) concentrates on collaboration among coworkers. In short, the former leans more heavily towards customer experience, while the latter prioritizes employee experience—though both can serve either through a shared tendency towards automation.

Both fall under the category of “Software as a Service” (SaaS), which is, itself, a subcategory of XaaS. SaaS offers users “plug and play” cloud-based apps. This is in contrast to other “as a service” models like:

1. IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service, which only makes a tech framework available to users through the cloud)
2. PaaS (Platform as a Service, which only allows access to tech that lets users develop their own solutions via the cloud)

But let’s get back to UCaaS and CCaaS. These acronyms are typically contrasted against each other because they’re both relevant to the interests of businesses that want to leverage cloud-based communications and have overlapping capabilities that serve different purposes.

The table below provides an easy-to-digest summary of the key differences between UCaaS and CCaaS.

What is the difference between CPaaS and CCaaS?

Another term that gets brought up in connection with CCaaS and UCaaS is CPaaS.

But what is CPaaS?

CPaaS stands for Communications Platform as a Service. It’s a software deployment platform that allows businesses to add real-time communication functionality to existing business applications.

CPaaS technology is most closely associated with communication APIs (application programming interfaces). These tools are like mini-bridges that connect larger programs like voice and video chat capabilities, live chat, messaging, VoIP telephony, and conferencing tools to an application that you’re using.

A better way to illustrate the concept of CPaas is this: think about your e-commerce app.

Chances are, it includes an option for you to connect to that online shop using live chat. Now here’s the thing—any message you send through the app still needs to be handled by a customer engagement rep, who is using technology that’s separate from the app to communicate with consumers. Expecting them to check two different programs just so they can serve all support requests isn’t really going to work. But with CPaaS, communications the company gets through the app can be connected to the agent’s service management tools.

In this way, CPaaS gives organizations the ability to deliver a truly omnichannel customer experience.

It’s a vastly different solution from CCaaS, but it’s nevertheless worth exploring for your company’s needs—especially if customizable experiences are important to you.

_{Bonus info! – Cloud contact center vs CCaaS}

_{Other terms used interchangeably on this topic include “CCaaS” and “cloud contact centers”. But did you know that they’re conceptually different things? While these are both cloud-based technologies for customer-focused communications, the former tends to offer access to the same solution other users get while the latter gets a solution that a buyer can more freely customize.}

_{A simpler way to describe it is this: CCaaS is like renting a car while cloud contact center is like renting an event space—when you rent a car, you can’t make changes to the car; but when you rent an event space, you can decorate and modify its layout as needed.}

_{Some technological developments have started to blur the lines of distinction between these terms, but it’s always helpful to know the nuances of some of these terms when you’re exploring solutions for your business.}

Using a CCaaS platform is important for contact centers that want to offer the best possible experience to customers without needing to worry about their technology failing them.

For a bit of context: historically speaking, a lot of contact and call center tools needed to be set up on-premises. This meant the organization not only had to shoulder the cost of acquisition, but it also had to take on the responsibility of maintenance and upgrades. To add to the complication, those technologies tended to be cobbled together using different vendors. This wasn’t just expensive—it was ultimately unwieldy and therefore distracted employees from their actual work.

With CCaaS solutions, which consolidate a lot of the applications contact centers need to operate, you leave the job of ensuring the technology works and gets updated to the vendor—who’s presumably good at it, because it’s what they do. Then you can concentrate on what you’re good at (which is connecting with customers).

What are the benefits of contact center software via CCaaS?

There are many reasons why an organization might invest in SaaS-type contact center software, but the most popular ones are:

It improves customer experience

Enhancing customer experiences is a priority for most (if not all) companies. With features like interactive voice response, skills-based routing, and call quality management, contact center software reduces call wait times and increases first call resolution rates, leading to enhanced customer satisfaction.

It optimizes agent experience

Omnichannel contact center software streamlines workflows, making day-to-day tasks less stressful and more rewarding for customer service agents. This helps improve overall workforce satisfaction levels.

With some CCaaS providers, agents can gain further peace of mind from being able to access a resource library, which can contain updated battle cards, press releases, and wikis. This data hub makes it easier for them to perform the way they should, ensuring they feel a sense of accomplishment from doing their work.

It’s cost-effective

Cloud-based communications in general require companies to pay a monthly subscription fee with little to no upfront costs. From there, CCaaS providers take care of maintenance and upgrades—meaning organizations don’t have to spend money on servers breaking down, hiring specialists to keep systems working, or investing in the next new tool to address shifts in customer behavior.

It’s easy to scale

Contact center software as a service helps organizations manage customer service teams regardless of the organization’s size. On top of seamless collaboration, these cloud-based platforms can scale alongside with the business as it grows. This is because specialized hardware is not necessary to run the system—all you need to do is log on to the dashboard, add users as necessary, and make sure the new agents know their login credentials. There’s no need to wait weeks for these changes to be applied.

It won’t cost you much either. In general, cloud-based contact center tech charges you much less per user than more traditional solutions.

Now that we’ve explored why you might want to invest in contact center as a service, we’ll go ahead and talk about making sure you find the right partner when you do decide to make the switch.

When you’re looking into CCaaS providers, you need to keep the following factors in mind:

• The contact center software features on offer
• The commitment to compliance
• What other customers think
• The total cost and ROI of the option

Let’s get into each of these in more detail.

Contact center software features

Consider the features you’ll need to make your agents’ lives easier and your customers happier. Which ones will deliver the most tangible cost savings while still optimizing operations?

At the very least, your CCaaS provider should offer the following:

Interactive Voice Response systems (IVR)

IVR is a business phone system feature that offers intuitive self-service functions that enable customers to resolve their own questions. This feature is a huge time-saver for contact centers and helps to free up agents so they can focus on more complex customer calls. Additionally, this capability can gather information needed to make sure customers who do have more complex queries are connected to the right representative. This brings us to…

Automatic Call Distribution (ACD)

Automatic Call Distribution uses caller information (either from records or from details provided via IVR) to direct inbound calls to the most relevant agent or resource. This ensures customers will get the help they need more quickly, without being passed from one person to another. Skills-based routing is a huge part of this mechanism.

Automated dialers

Auto dialers boost the efficiency of outbound calling activities by making phone calls on behalf of sales teams. This means agents won’t need to worry about whether they called the wrong contact, or waste time waiting for a human being to pick up the phone. The dialers will do this for them, and only connect agents to the call if a person is ready to speak on the other end of the line.

Omnichannel support

One of the biggest changes in the world of customer support is channel diversification. That is to say, more and more people prefer to use other modes of contact to reach your business. As such, you’ll want to make sure your CCaaS provider covers communications channels your buyers or subscribers prefer. You may also want to consider the provider's ability to expand their supported channels.

CRM integrations

Built-in CRM integrations enable you to connect your communications-focused contact center solutions to customer relationship management software like Salesforce or Zendesk. That way, you can make calls or send messages straight out of your CRM dashboard or pull information from your CRM database when you use your cloud-based contact center control panel to respond to queries.

Other app integrations

Of course, CRMs aren’t the only other tools your contact center needs to work with. Ask if your CCaaS provider offers APIs for custom applications. It’s a good idea to examine the pre-built app integrations to see if common tools like scheduling and productivity mobile apps are included. You might also want to see if the solution can integrate with other communication tools like Microsoft Teams, which could make internal collaboration for customer problem-solving easier.

There are other features you’ll probably want to look out for, like workforce management and optimization tools, speech analytics, chatbots powered by artificial intelligence, and post-call notes. But the features enumerated above address the most basic needs of a contemporary contact center.

Compliance

Check with the vendor if their compliance certifications are regularly refreshed to protect your customer and business data. In fact, you’ll want to look into which compliance certifications they have. This is especially true if you’re running an organization that needs to adhere to strict standards for protecting personal data. For instance, PCI is a common compliance requirement for financial organizations that handle sensitive banking information.

Customer reviews

Reviews from like-minded businesses in similar industries are a great frame of reference for the most suitable software. Organizations of your size are best placed to advise whether the software is right for your operation. This is, of course, on top of considering assessments reported by respected bodies like Gartner. Check out our customer review page for examples of feedback you'd want to look into.

Total cost and ROI

The total cost of your contact center as a service solution should factor in the total enterprise cost over time, and take into account:

• End-user expenses
• Subscription fees
• Support and management
• Employee training
• Productivity losses during migration and maintenance
• All other operating costs

The ROI of your software implementation is assessed through the consideration of elements like customer satisfaction scores (CSAT), which you should be able to run directly from your software.

8x8’s cloud contact center software solution makes it easy for your agents to collaborate and connect with valued customers. Its complete and secure cloud CCaaS promotes consistency in the customer journey while optimizing workforce management.

Schedule a demo and see how our unified solutions can serve your contact center and even your organization as a whole. Alternatively, talk to our Sales agents to learn more about our XCaaS offerings.