Even though cloud contact centers are becoming mainstream on the enterprise level, it was born out of necessity for small businesses. The cloud-enabled small businesses to spin up a contact center without the large investment in hardware. Now those cost savings at scale are paving the way for enterprises to embrace CCaaS in a way no one saw coming.
The history of CCaaS is not a steady, constant line. In fact, it would look more like the trajectory of cryptocurrency, one step forward, two steps back, then thirty steps up, repeat. As has been proven time and time again in the contact center world you can be a leader today and gone tomorrow, a lesson ShoreTel learned the hard way.
It is that mindset of constantly leading from the front that has us motivated and determined always to be evolving here at InflowCX for our employees and customers. Knowing where we have been as an industry and organization is pivotal to know where the future will take us.
At First, There Were Three In The CCaaS World
Imagine googling CCaaS companies and not finding thirty paid search ads and only a few companies to choose from Genesys, NICE InContact, and Five9. In 2010 that was the case, with the solution being a cloud version of a fundamental contact center. It was just the platform itself, none of the robust feature stack that we associate with CCaaS today.
This was basically a lift and shift to adapt an on-premise solution in the cloud. This was a huge value proposition for small businesses that didn’t have the capital to invest in a large solution. Now, they could spin up a useful solution and hire agents who would be familiar with the technology while only needing to adapt to the interface. This was the CCaaS world for most of the 2010s without much innovation on the cloud side.
CCaaS Begins To Become Scalable
Then some very savvy CIOs and most likely CFOs began to take notice that with increased bandwidth came increased savings if cloud contact centers could scale, which they could. Then the “on-premise vs. cloud” contact center discussion came to be. A major point of contention was security.
Once that box was checked, the early adopters saw that the platform was reliable and scalable and agents could easily work from anywhere with an internet connection. In essence, the wide-scale availability of broadband was one of the many catalysts for CCaaS to scale. Now instead of each contact center needing a server room, an endpoint is all that was needed to get going.
Migrating Features And Agents To The Cloud In The Contact Center
With CCaaS being adopted at the enterprise level came heavy investment in existing companies and funding for new innovative companies that capitalized on the opportunity. Instead of just platforms now traditional features could migrate to the cloud as well like Quality Management, Workforce Management (WFM), and analytics.
The IVR technology evolved quickly from being something customers loathed to being tolerable and even widely accepted because…it worked! Being able to integrate the way customers actually wanted to communicate, SMS, chat, and email with CRMs, so that all contacts were captured versus manually entered was the gateway into where we find ourselves today. However, most of the features available were the same as on-premise solutions.
Innovation Born In The Cloud
The world of CCaaS that we find ourselves in today consists of features not just being transferred from premise-based systems but actually innovated for the cloud specifically. Instead of just IVR, we have agent assist and virtual agents. Customers have gone from loathing an IVR system, to expecting it and actually wanting automation.
Chatbots and knowledge base go hand-in-hand with the website. An AI-based chat can be taken over by an agent that can transform into a screen share to resolve the customer’s concern and even end with a video call. The integrations and development available in the cloud weren’t even on the radar three years ago, and that trend continues at the speed of innovation.
The investment dollars and players entering the CCaaS space mean great things ahead for customers, agents, and companies. Zoom, Salesforce, Slack, and other large players are competing, and when they compete it is a beautiful thing for all of us in the CCaaS world. Serving agents and customers most effectively has been and will continue to be the focus in our space.
Solving The Talent Shortage In The Contact Center Through BPO
Outsourcing had such a negative connotation a decade ago, however, that world and the contact center world have been and will continue to be a good option. With the worker shortage at an all-time high, finding the right placement for all of those contacts is a challenge that we are helping our clients overcome.
Talent, technology, tools, automation, and the right combination of all of these are what we help our clients with on a daily basis. If you are wondering how to bring all of these together to meet the needs of your business we should talk! Let’s set up a call with our team and get the contact center of the future working for you today!
