X CCaaS Features for Modern CX

Do you know which CCaaS features your brand needs to empower better customer experiences?

Over the last few years, companies have begun to invest more time and money into building unforgettable experiences for their clients. Studies prove that customer experience is the number one solution to guarantee continued loyalty from your clients. What’s more, 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a service if they know they’ll get a good experience out of it.

Since the pandemic, the demand for excellent brand moments has only increased. Customers have begun to connect with companies on new channels, and they’re holding brands to much higher standards. The question for businesses is – how do you stay ahead of the curve?

CCaaS, or Contact Centre as a Service solutions represent a powerful opportunity for companies who want to be able to serve their clients in any environment.

Here’s your guide to the key CCaaS features for modern CX.

Why is CCaaS Crucial for Modern CX?

Today’s customers have higher expectations of brands. We know that companies have access to the tools they need to deliver faster, more efficient service, and we’re not willing to accept anything less than the best. Even being left on hold or transferred too many times can make or break a customer’s relationship with your company. We’re living in an environment where 41% of customers say they’ve stopped using a product or service after being passed from one agent to another.

A traditional contact center environment would struggle to keep up in a world where digital transformation is moving at an accelerated pace. Companies are constantly implementing new ways to serve their customers in an evolving landscape, and any business that can’t keep up risks losing their client’s custom. That’s where CCaaS comes in.

Where installing new services and solutions in a traditional contact centre would have required extensive investment, maintenance, and IT skills, updating your contact centre in the CCaaS environment is quick and simple. You can add new communication channels at the touch of a button, empower remote agents to address peaks in demand, and even track customer experience opportunities with enhanced analytics and AI.

There’s no one-size-fits-all checklist for the ultimate CCaaS features for CX, as every business will have a different set of customers to serve. However, we can look at some of the trending solutions generating the best results in the current landscape, such as:

1. Scalable Infrastructure and Easy Provisioning

This is a feature that’s often overlooked in a discussion about customer experience. However, if you don’t have the ability to serve a growing number of customers, then you can’t provide exceptional experiences. Customers hate being left on hold, and today’s contact centres can only fill the on-premise office with so many people before they encounter a health and safety risk.

Fortunately, scalable infrastructure is one of the most common features of any CCaaS solution. Today’s offerings from major brands make it easy to add new numbers and minutes to your subscription packages at the touch of a button. Choose a vendor with a global presence, and you can even access local numbers in locations all around the world.

Even better, as well as being able to grow and expand your contact center whenever you choose, you can also easily provision your employees with new features, regardless of where they are. Central cloud-based administration systems allow business leaders to immediately set a new employee up on a contact centre platform within a matter of seconds, and issue log-in codes from anywhere. Companies can also remove access to certain functions from the cloud, making it easier to protect the company when team members leave the staff roster.

From a single cloud environment, you can issue new patches to employees, bring remote and flexible workers on broad, or even build an entirely new branch of your contact centre in a different part of the world, all without compromising on functionality and security.

2. Omnichannel Interactions

In 2019, Salesforce found that the average customer now uses around 10 channels to communicate with a brand. While a strong voice strategy is still crucial to good customer experience, many of your clients will be looking for opportunities to interact with you through different avenues too. Gartner predicts that around 72% of customer interactions will soon involve things like mobile applications and messaging. Even video interaction is growing more popular.

Offering the highest level of service to your customers means being able to serve them on the channels they’re most comfortable with. Fortunately, CCaaS environments open the door for a wider range of communication options. You can easily add new channels like SMS or social media service to your cloud contact centre, and sync conversations across multiple channels in the same environment. The cloud landscape gives agents a single space to track all conversations.

By bringing all of your omnichannel interactions together into one environment, you can also get a better view of the customer journey from start to finish. This improves agent ability to maintain context and consistency in a conversation, so clients don’t have to repeat their issue.

Many organisations are even taking their omnichannel strategy to the next level by integrating other tools from outside the communication landscape, like CRM technology for tracking customer experience, or ERP tools.

3. AI and Natural Language Understanding

Artificial intelligence has been building a presence within the contact centre environment for some time now. It started with more intelligent IVR (Interactive Voice Response) technology, which allowed for smarter routing strategies, and the ability to send customers directly to the agents most likely to have the talent to address certain problems.

Today’s IVR solutions are increasingly equipped with natural language understanding and NLP technology to take analysis of customer voice even further. Intelligent agents built into the IVR, and routing system can respond automatically to trigger words in a customer’s request, or even detect the identity of a customer based on their voice pattern.

Natural language understanding also has a role to play in the development of self-service strategies. 70% of customers now expect a company’s website to include an option for self service in chat. Increasingly, these clients are also looking for evidence of NLU and NLP technology in the bots they interact with via voice too. The growth of smart speakers and virtual agents has made all of us more comfortable with the idea of human/machine conversations.

Intelligent tools capable of understanding customer queries can significantly improve the customer experience, by accelerating the path to resolution for common problems. Self-service solutions also take some of the pressure off human agents, so they can focus on more complex problems. In some cases, the AI and natural language processing tools available in CCaaS today can even offer an insight into what customers are thinking and feeling, with the help of real-time sentiment analysis.

4. Enhanced Analytics and Reporting

Analytics and reporting in the contact centre are how companies make sure they’re keeping up with the expectations of their clients. Through the right reporting tools, it’s possible to keep track of everything from call and video quality to the sentiment and perception of your target customer. Analytics in the CCaaS environment currently fall into two categories: real-time and historical insights.

Real-time insights are the immediate data points that companies can use to improve customer experience in the movement. A bot examining a conversation for sentiment analysis can immediately detect if a customer’s opinion towards a brand is changing based on their words and tone of voice. That bot may then automatically send a notification to a contact centre supervisor, to inform them an agent is need of guidance or help.

A real-time analytics system could even search through examples of previous successful conversations and deliver suggestions to an agent in the form of a screen pop, to help them decide what to do next. Real-time analytics can examine metrics ranging all the way from customer satisfaction to number of calls handled per minute, and even call quality.

Alternatively, the historical insights collected in a CCaaS solution provide a more in-depth view of the customer journey overall, and how various aspects of that journey might change over time. Companies can use their historical information to track changing trends in customer experience and expectations. You could determine which of your customer service channels your clients use the most often, and what kind of problems people deal with most commonly.

Historical data can help you to decide which questions your chat bots should be programmed to answer, and what kind of changes you need to implement to better-serve your audience. This information can also help you to predict future trends, changes in customer preferences, and even moments of increased demand for customer service in your business calendar.

5. Tools for Agent Empowerment

A great customer experience, in almost any business or industry, will always start with an excellent agent experience. Today’s contact centre agents, working in a variety of hybrid and remote environments, need access to the right tools and solutions to achieve their performance goals. Studies have previously discovered that customers waiting in queues to speak to an agent aren’t as worried about the time they spend in line as they are about the quality of the conversation.

Immediately, CCaaS paves the way for better agent experiences by ensuring that employees can connect with customers from anywhere. This flexible environment makes it easier for businesses to add new agents and improve staffing when the demand calls for it. At the same time, it also allows for various integrations and enhancements intended to improve agent productivity.

Aside from serving customers, chatbots and virtual agents in the CCaaS environment can also aid agents, by providing them with access to instant information and answers to common questions. Integrations with CRM systems can immediately pull up customer information when agents need to refer to previous purchases or issues, and intelligent routing tools make sure that the agents with the right skills get the calls most suited to them.

CCaaS also empowers agents by opening the door to better back-end collaboration. Many of today’s CCaaS tools come with integrations to UCaaS and collaboration technology. This makes it easier for employees in any environment to reach out to a specialist in their community when they need help dealing with customer problems. Around 70% of employees currently say they have had to leave a customer conversation before to consult with a colleague. The right UCaaS and CCaaS solution could solve this problem.

Improving Customer Experience with CCaaS

CCaaS solutions allow companies to break away from clunky, expensive legacy solutions for customer experience and service. The cloud based CCaaS environment comes with endless flexibility for an audience and environment that’s constantly changing. APIs and integrations make it easier to sync business data with systems throughout your business landscape, while cloud-based technology means you can easily expand or change your contact centre functionality at any time.

CCaaS solutions also come with the added benefit of reduced costs for the contact centre. In the past, maintaining and running legacy and on-premises infrastructure often turned the contact center into a huge source of budgetary issues. Today, the CCaaS solution can be as agile and affordable as companies need it to be. Even if companies decide to make the transition to CCaaS, they can use subscription services to pay for only the functionality they need.

However, just because CCaaS offers a lot of benefits to today’s companies, doesn’t mean that there aren’t challenges to overcome too. Before implementing any new technology, business leaders will need to consider which features, such as the ones mentioned above, are most important to their investment. Additionally, they’ll need to ensure those features don’t come at the expensive of crucial things like ease of use, security, and compliance.

Get help choosing the CCaaS solution with your ideal range of features today. Trust the team at UC Advisor to help you find the ultimate contact centre.