CCaaS for businesses

What is CCaaS, and how can you be sure that a CCaaS platform is right for your business? We’re going to explore these questions and more at length, so you can make fully informed decisions about which CCaaS provider to choose and which features you want to prioritise.

What does CCaaS mean?

Before we can consider what the most important features of a CCaaS solution are, we’ve got to consider the meaning of the term.

You’ll likely be familiar with call centres. These are the spaces set up to allow customers to phone your business with questions, concerns, feedback, or simply to reach out. Some call centres also support outgoing calls, including sales calls and cold calls.

Contact centres are a touch more sophisticated. They allow agents and customers to connect across multiple channels, such as via voice calls, video calls, SMS, text channels, social media messaging functionalities, and more.

Contact centre as a service refers to a software-based solution that businesses invest in on a subscription basis. The software provides all the features and functions your teams need to serve customers across multiple channels.

Key features and aspects to consider when assessing CCaaS providers

So, how can you ensure you choose the best possible CCaaS provider for your business? Any virtual call or contact centre worth its salt should tick all the boxes in the following areas:

Real-time coaching features

Your agents are the core of your customer service strategy. When they’re equipped appropriately, they’ll be able to support all manner of customers across all channels, boosting your company’s reputation and ensuring you’re making customers happy.

This is why you should always be on the lookout for must-have CCaaS features that help agents maximise their efficiency and productivity.

For example, Dialpad has a Real-Time Assist feature that utilises AI to help provide relevant information or prompts to agents as they’re on a call. This makes it easier for them to handle new situations and resolve complex or unfamiliar queries:

What counts as a must-have feature will differ from one business to the next, but if you know what your business can’t do without, then you can narrow down you list of CCaaS alternatives.

Support

The CCaaS platform of your choice should come with customer support that’s available as easily and readily as possible.

You can never be sure, after all, when a problem might arise. Even the best products can go through hiccups sometimes, just as the most capable employees might be confused by a new software feature simply because it’s unfamiliar.

This is why you need top-quality customer service from any prospective provider. Dialpad Ai Contact Centre, for example, comes with live chat and phone support 24/7, for both of its Pro and Enterprise plans.

Integrations with your favourite tools

Contact centres are all about providing the best possible service to your customers, which your agents can only do when they have access to the right tools.

This is why the ability to integrate your preferred tools is a crucial feature of a good CCaaS solution.

The more expansive the selection of integrations is, the better. A CCaaS solution that lets you customise it by integrating all your usual tools and apps—think CRMs, productivity tools, and more—is one that will save your employees time they’d otherwise spend searching for the apps they need:

Pricing plans

Flexibility and value for money are the main factors to bear in mind here.

Does the provider you’re considering have enough options to properly cater to your needs or would you have to push your budget further to accommodate their solution? Likewise, do their pricing plans include the features you need, or would these cost extra?

This is how you can assess whether a pricing plan is appropriate for your business.

Scalability

On a related note, it’s important to ask yourself whether a given provider can help you scale up quickly, easily, and effectively. If your business grows suddenly, can your CCaaS solution grow with you?

Scalability is crucial even for businesses that aren’t planning to grow in the near future. This is because a scalable solution is built to handle any sudden changes to your staff size, so if a sudden busy season strikes, it can handle the added stress seamlessly.

With Dialpad Ai Contact Centre, you can easily add new agents and users to your contact centre with a few clicks from your online dashboard:

Plus, with a scalable solution, you don’t have to change providers as you’re looking to expand your business. This saves you time and effort, and avoids the issue of having to teach your employees to use a brand new system just as they’re adjusting to the growth of the business.

Business benefits of CCaaS solutions over legacy alternatives

Next, let’s look at some of the reasons why CCaaS solutions are more advantageous than legacy tools and why it’s well worth investing in a CCaaS solution and leaving the legacy options in the past:

They’re more cost-effective

Legacy solutions are typically costly. Their installation alone often requires specialists, who will need to be on site to complete the process. Also, anytime you want to scale up, you’ll have to contact specialists again to ensure your legacy solution is properly adjusted to support the growth of your business.

The cost of maintenance and upkeep of the hardware associated with legacy telephone systems, too, can quickly mount up.

CCaaS solutions, on the other hand, save costs in a range of ways. You generally only pay a set monthly fee to use a CCaaS solution. This means you can accurately calculate how much of your budget to allocate to your CCaaS solution each time.

Hardware requirements, meanwhile, are minimal and any updates or improvements to the solution get handled by your provider.

Reduced reliance on hardware

As mentioned above, CCaaS solutions don’t need to be installed by a specialist. This is because they’re software-based.

All you need to start using a CCaaS tool is a device that can connect to the internet. Whether that’s a company laptop you’ve been using for years or a brand-new tablet doesn’t matter; CCaaS doesn’t discriminate, provided the gadget in question can install the CCaaS software.

This also means that businesses looking to spend less on new devices can benefit hugely from choosing a CCaaS platform.

Easier management

Contact centre managers are tasked with looking after both their teams and the customers those agents communicate with. This can be challenging unless they’re getting the support they need.

CCaaS solutions help provide this support.

By unifying all contact centre channels, CCaaS solutions help your managers keep track of what everyone is doing at any given time. Useful features like the live transcriptions that Dialpad offers also help with this.

Dialpad's AI-powered live sentiment analysis makes it even easier for managers to know when to jump into calls or other live communications. It shows managers how customers are feeling in every ongoing interaction, so they can intervene right when agents need them:

Ideal for remote work

Legacy solutions are geared towards on-premises working, which is useful if none of your employees ever work remotely.

For companies that want to offer flexible working setups, employ remote agents, or prepare for situations that make hybrid work the better choice, a solution that allows employees to work from home is a must.

In fact, modern CCaaS tools are ideal for working from anywhere. That’s because they can be accessed by employees remotely from any device, as long as they’ve got their login credentials and a working internet connection.

Fun fact: You can access Dialpad’s full app from your browser, without needing to install the desktop or mobile app. This way, you can truly work from anywhere, because all of our features are available to browser users at all times. This boosts flexibility and makes remote work a realistic option for your teams:

CCaaS and UCaaS solutions working in harmony can help you nail your business communications

Business communication doesn’t have to be complicated. With UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service) and CCaaS uniting to provide the ultimate comms solution, you can handle all communications from a single app.

Dialpad offers exactly this.

Thanks to Dialpad Ai Contact Centre being integrated into the UCaaS solution, you can have access to a business comms tool and a fully-fledged contact centre all in one solution. This saves you time, effort, and money.

In practice, it also helps employees be more productive, as everything they need is integrated into a single central platform.