What is CCaaS?
The term CCaaS stands for Contact Center as a Service. You may also hear the term hosted contact center used synonymously. It is a cloud offering that provides the essential capabilities required to route inbound customer interactions to the appropriate call center agent, including:
- Automatic contact distributor (ACD) –The ACD is a skills-based routing engine that manages a universal queue for messaging, social, voice, self-service artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot interactions, provides a consolidated omnichannel agent desktop with customer context and a drag-and-drop application for designing contact flows. Agents are assigned skills based on their training and expertise and the ACD then routes interactions to them to ensure optimal customer experiences.
- Interactive voice response (IVR) – The interactive menu that lets callers choose the type of help they want such as by saying options out loud or pressing a number. Callers frequently will opt for self-service for basic issues such as paying a bill or account queries and the IVR system facilitates that option. When the IVR system is integrated with the ACD, companies gain additional functionality and efficiencies as they share data between them, such as data collected in the IVR system being shared with the ACD.
- Outbound software/predictive dialer – Contact centers can handle inbound customer interactions (inbound call center) and provide agents the outbound software, called a predictive dialer, needed to conduct proactive outreach to customers (outbound call center). Modern predictive dialers can help sales and customer service agents achieve a higher connect rate and eliminate the awkward pause common among outbound software solutions.
What does it mean to have cloud call center software?
Contact Center as a Service (CcaaS) means that the software itself operates in the cloud without on-premise hardware to manage. True CCaaS solutions are cloud native – meaning they were developed to be run in the cloud, take advantage of modern microservice technologies, have elastic scalability, are architected to empower users to adapt to rapidly changing market conditions and more.
How NICE can help
NICE CXone, a CCaaS offering, has been a cloud native application based on modern architecture and technologies for over 13 years. It is widely recognized by all leading industry analysts as the cloud leader.
CXone includes core capabilities of a CCaaS offering, such as:
But CXone goes well beyond these core capabilities to include:
- Workforce optimization – manages your workforce with workforce management, quality management, customer satisfaction surveys and performance management.
- Automation & Artificial Intelligence (AI) – leading-edge, intuitive technology that eliminates mundane tasks and speeds resolutions of customer issues for better business outcomes. It provides self-service, agent-assisted and fully automated alerts and actions.
- Analytics – turns insights into results by making data relevant, easy to consume and actionable to drive measurable improvements and understand the omnichannel experience customers receive. These solutions include interaction analytics, reporting and performance management.
- Open Cloud Foundation – enables rapid innovation with an extensible enterprise-grade platform that scales securely, deploys quickly and serves customers of all sizes globally. We guarantee an industry-best 99.99% availability and offer easy customization through RESTful APIs and DEVone developer program.